Nadella, Gates, and Ballmer have all admitted to Microsoft’s mobile mistakes.

  • kirklennon@kbin.social
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    1 year ago

    In retrospect, I think there could have been ways we could have made it work by perhaps reinventing the category of computing between PCs, tablets, and phones.

    I’m sorry but no, Microsoft was never going to be capable of reinventing any category of computing. They’ve never done it before and it’s just not within their expertise. I think Nadella was right at the time to cut their losses. Windows Phone represented Microsoft’s best efforts in that space and, while it had its fans, it just wasn’t enough.

    Meanwhile, they’ve done really well with their “apps and services on every platform” approach. How many millions of people use Outlook on their phone? How many apps are running their back end on Azure? Microsoft may have given up on an aspect of “mobile,” but is still raking in piles of cash from what people actually do on mobile devices. Take the win where you can find it.

    • bluGill@kbin.social
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      1 year ago

      The windows phone was not out for very long. It is unknown if it would have succeed, but at the time Android was an also ran as well, and non-smart phones still dominated. Blackberry was still a major player to beat at the time. Windows if they stuck with it might have done reasonably well. It would never have become a monopoly, but we cannot know how well it would have done.

    • BigBlackCockroach@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      A lot of businesses use windows as their main OS for people to use, MS could have used that skew to get a foot in the door with the windows phone. It would have been incredibly helpful and convenient for those business folks / office workers to be able to use all their windows stuff on their phone seemlessly.

      TBH i feel that door hasn’t closed yet if they made a real category breaking new entry like a dedicated business phone that was like windows but on your phone.

      • kirklennon@kbin.social
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        1 year ago

        Microsoft already was trying to leverage the popularity of Windows to make Windows Phone more popular but it didn’t work. Apple, meanwhile, licensed Microsoft Exchange for iPhone and basically established Microsoft’s entire product strategy under Nadella: providing high-margin services on whatever device people actually want to use.

        • BigBlackCockroach@lemmy.world
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          1 year ago

          Microsoft already was trying to leverage the popularity of Windows to make Windows Phone more popular but it didn’t work.

          good point, i had no idea

      • Buck Fucket@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        Especially with Microsoft Teams. Teams is such a powerful application for businesses. It’s a pain in the ass to use on my work iPhone. ID love to have MS Phone again. They were well built and I never had any software or battery issues.

    • pycorax@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      They definitely did with Surface. They stumbled for a bit but the Pro 3 - 4 made 2-in-1 laptops actually good.

      • kirklennon@kbin.social
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        1 year ago

        Microsoft made a decent touchscreen Windows laptop, but that’s a niche within a shrinking market. I don’t think they did much to reinvent the category. It’s better, but it’s not a fundamentally different product than what was for sale 20 years ago.