Microsoft Exec Says Windows 10 Mobile is No Longer a 'Focus' (engadget.com)

From a report: Microsoft's Joe Belfiore informed Twitter users that new features and hardware for Windows 10 Mobile "aren't the focus" any more. There will be fixes and security patches, of course, but you shouldn't expect more than that. As for why the platform has been all but dropped? The executive boils it down to one main reason: the difficulty of getting developers to write apps. Microsoft tried paying companies to produce apps and even wrote them itself when creators couldn't or wouldn't get involved, but the number of users was "too low for most companies to invest." Why build an app for a relatively small bunch of Windows phone owners when there are many more Android and iOS users? Belfiore himself switched to Android for the "app/[hardware] diversity." It's a bit more complicated than that, of course. You can point to a few other factors in Windows' fate on phones, such as slowness in responding to Apple and Google as well as an inconsistent hardware strategy (you could rarely count on getting a timely sequel to a handset you liked). Whatever the reason, it's safe to say that Microsoft isn't just acknowledging that Android and iOS hold a clear lead -- it's quashing any hopes for a comeback, at least for the foreseeable future.

Comments

Re:I'm still floored

[Rob Y.]

To be fair, they saw mobile. What they didn't see was Open Source mobile. According to the standard Microsoft playbook

  1. Microsoft would be in mobile - because they 'have' to be in everything, tech wise. But their offerings would have limited appeal - mostly to business execs.
  2. iOS would come out and redefine mobile
  3. Microsoft would observe iOS and see what it takes to be successful.
  4. Microsoft would make a system that works like iOS and sell it to OEM's at low enough prices that they would be the only viable alternative to iOS.

Google short-circuited that plan at step 4, and Android became what Windows mobile would've been. In fact Android's weakness (being Open Source, it was allowed to diverge enough from the 'standard' to make timely upgrades near impossible) was also it's biggest strength (allowing OEM's to attempt to differentiate themselves led to healthy competition and a great deal of innovation). Would there be hundreds of Windows Phone manufacturers, if all those phones had to be essentially the same on the inside? I don't know. Of course, now many of us would like Android phones to be as stock as possible - having witnessed the downside. But in any case, the alternative to iOS has been established, and Microsoft is at least smart enough to understand that now.

Re:A burn Nokia

[Uecker]

You got some things right (Elop took a wrong turn and killed the company), but it's not quite as straightforward. Nokia was losing market share way before they ever hired Elop. Their share of the smartphone market fell from 50,8 % in Q2 of '07 to 37,3 % in Q2 of '10.

This agrees with what I wrote. I think these number are what caused the panic reaction. But measuring percentage changes with a growing total is just a meaningless thing to do. Let's say you sell 50 items and one year and 90 next year. Somebody else realized this is a profitable business and sells 10 item (after selling 0 before). Then your market share dropped from 100% to 90% despite this being a very successful business.

The reason was quite simple: the iPhone Meego was taking too long and they were getting their asses kicked by Android and Apple. Symbian was just way too outdated to match the iphone, and the iphone 3G/3Gs just made the situation worse and the fall more rapid.

This true except that Nokia still was highly profitable and the largest vendor. This would have been an excellent position to introduce Meego. Although earlier would have been better, I disagree with the statement that it would have been too late.

The company panicked, and the investors panicked and saw the management as incapable of recovering from this tailspin. Elop was hired to turn the course, but instead of pushing Meego out asap they went with windows phones which sealed the fate of the company.

Here I agree.

But the general point is this: Nokia had dug their own grave way before Elop.

Why? Again, they where highly profitable before Elop and already working on Meego. In my opinion, it is clear that they would just have to continue with this strategy and they would have been fine.

They didn't see the paradigm shift to smartphones early enough. I know that Nokia had its first prototypes of a touch screen operated smartphones in the works slightly after the turn of the century but the project was canned as too clunky/expensive. They weren't ready to compere with the iPhone, and they falsely assumed that they could maintain their market foothold with regular 'dumb' phones until they could switch from Symbian to Meego/something else but they did not expect the rapid pace of expansion of Apple into the market, or the rate at which dumb phones would lose relevance in the advanced economies especially.

I don't understand this. Symbian phones were not dump phones. Also when Nokia collapsed, it was Samsung and Android filling the void - not Apple. Meego was much better than Android. So why do you think it would have failed?

Source: I know people that used to work for Nokia way back in its prime, as well as having studied the downfall of the company as part of my business administration studies here in Finland,