Windows Phone: The product with so much potential had everything for it, and yet it failed spectacularly. Despite billions of dollars and precious connections from Microsoft, Windows Phone never took off and it would go down in the history of one of Microsoft's most expensive mistakes. In this, we look at the reasons for its failure and the actions Microsoft might have taken to prevent it. This video is brought to you by Dashlane. Keep your devices safe and strong by registering with a link in the description. When Steve Jobs announced the iPhone in 2007, the storm took the smartphone world. Well, how do I scroll through my cast list? How do I do this I just take my finger and I scroll? By that time, smartphones had a major problem: they had smaller screens with interfaces that were harder to navigate, and the reason for this was because half of the phone was occupied by a keyboard with small buttons called You could press with any precision. Steve Jobs showed the game changer to his eccentric audience, but it wasn't just Apple fans watching. Google's engineers, who had been manufacturing their own smartphones for the past few years, had to scrap their entire projectile, to begin with, the touchscreen design. Their final product, Android, would arrive a year later, at which point the iPhone took the crown of the smartphone.
The iPhone model was built on exclusivity: it was built entirely by Apple to establish maximum control over user experience and product quality, which allowed Apple to charge a premium for their phones. To succeed Android would have to adopt a different approach: Instead of going for exclusivity, Google tried to be everyone's friend, partnering with as many phone manufacturers as possible with their phone's selling point, this Along with the fact that they were cheap, yet functional. For a time, the smartphone world was in balance, with Android and iPhone occupying very different segments of the market. And yet, this balance would soon upset another tech giant, Microsoft. Now, of the three companies, it was Microsoft that had the most experience with mobile devices. Back in 1996, Bill Gates unveiled what he called a handheld PC, which was more than a small laptop. I asked Tom CEGroup from the Windows group to join me on stage and gave us a quick glimpse of some of the neat things that have been built into a handheld PC. For those of you who haven't seen yet, Bill talked a little bit about the handheld PC and it happens to be the Cassone.
The Casio unit is a specialty of handheld PC, so it has a physical keyboard, 480x240 2 bit per pixel screen, IR, PC card, upgradable RAM, 2 AA batteries. So this is a pretty typical handheld PC. The operating system it ran was known as WindowsCE, which was originally modified to allow Windows 3 to function to the lowest possible specifications. Over the next decade, Microsoft will scale up and develop this product line extensively, leading to the other 6 full releases. Between 2006 and 2008 Microsoft's mobiles claimed 15% market share, more than any of their competitors except Symbi Nokia. But this success is exactly what blinded Microsoft to the iPhone. When Steve Ballmer, CEO of Microsoft at the time, was asked about the iPhone, he stated that he was quite well. Steve asked me about the iPhone and Zune. Zoon is getting some traction and Steve Jobs for Macworld and he kicks this iPhone out. When you saw, what was your first reaction? $ 500, with a plan fully subsidized! I said, 'It's the most expensive phone in the world' and it doesn't appeal to business customers because it doesn't have a keyboard, which doesn't make it a very good email machine. However, even more precious, is the clarity of the next question.
However, how do you compete with it? He sucked into the spotlight in a few weeks because of what happened at Macworld, not only with the iPhone but with the new iPhone. How do you compete with Zune? Right now, let's take the phone first. Right now we are selling millions and crores of phones a year. Apple is selling zero phones a year.
Notice the difference between the twine: the reporter very clearly sees the iPhone's innovations as a threat to older smartphone treatments, but Microsoft CEOs can barely see sales numbers. And if you're thinking that he's no exception, the CEOs of BlackBerry and Palm were equally skeptical of the new iPhone. It took Microsoft a full year of decline market share and eventually realized something had to be done. Unlike Microsoft, BlackBerry's sales are growing steadily, which has given them a sense of confidence they never recover. Now, as they say, it was better when Microsoft finally got around it, their development was very fast. Microsoft began developing touchscreen-based mobile devices in late 2008 and it took them only two years to get it to market. What Steve Ballmer revealed was in fact a very product whose advancement in smartphone design is not really widely recognized, but it should be. At a time when the iPhone and Android were with static icons, Windows Phone gave you tiles with live information.
Overall, there was much to praise from critics: Windows Phone was designed next to Apple in terms of user experience and because Microsoft had very strict requirements for the hardware used by phone manufacturers, all early Windows Phones were very powerful machines for their time. And yet,
Microsoft soon ran into a major problem.
You see, Microsoft wanted to do some hard work: It was emulating Apple in an attempt to exert strict control over the Apple experience and hardware, but unlike Apple, it wasn't making its own phone. This approach made Windows Phone a very sophisticated product, but Microsoft's degree of control made it a lot more difficult for phone manufacturers for them to work with than Android.
Unexpectedly, most phone manufacturers decided to partner with Google, which left Microsoft in a very poor position: it had no great product to build it on.
The only saving grace for Microsoft was the lucky connection: when Nokia replaced its CEO in September 2010, the new guy, Stephen Elop, was a former Microsoft executive and the first item on his agenda to abandon Symbian and pivoting to Nokia's dwindling market share Had to try. Towards Windows Phone. Now, you can tell that it was a very predetermined one because of this massive transition, during which Nokia completely changed its products, took place over a period of one year. Nokia started selling its first Windows Phone in November 2011 and I can tell you right away that Nokia might have raised billions of dollars thanks to "platform support payments". Nokia was about to pay Microsoft a licensing, but in fact, it was getting $ 250 million back from Microsoft every quarter, which was more than their expenses. Of course, other phone manufacturers knew this was happening, which pushed them away from Microsoft as well. After all, why would they pay license fees to Microsoft for their own development fund, when Nokia was getting all this for free? Effectively, Microsoft had moved to No Nokia all along and was not going back. But sadly for Microsoft, it was too late. By the time Microsoft launched its production solution, four years after the introduction of the iPhone, it had fallen to 2% market share. Android and iOS were clear winners, given that no one was developing applications for Windows Phone and why they would.
For its first three years, the Windows phone app store was empty: it didn't have Instagram, it didn't
By 2013, Nokia's stock price had fallen to 75%, at which angry shareholders were threatening to fire Stephen Elop completely and get rid of Microsoft altogether. Finally, it did not: Microsoft instead bought Nokia's mobile phone division in 2014 for $ 7.2 billion. The funny thing here is a very good year Microsoft wrote down its investment for $ 7.6 billion and then shrugged off the top things by about 8,000. Employees. Microsoft placed Windows Phone Life Support in October 2017, but it was dead long before that. And yet, it was not easy to imagine a separate Windows Phone, as it was not only greedy with its original structure. If Microsoft had been willing to compromise production controls, it would have readily accepted Windows Phone to major manufacturers instead of Android. After all, Google then had a practical ecosystem to speak of, while Microsoft was a software titan for decades.
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