Many years later and I'm still bitter that the tech press laughed Windows Phone out of the room straight to its demise. Yes it had very little developer support but at some point things were looking up. It was just the butt of too many jokes from influential people.

A third ecosystem right now would have been amazing

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The_President 6 hours ago | parent | next [-]

The Windows phone didn't make it due to Microsoft failing to compete, not the press.

Not many tech products exite me less than the concept of a Microsoft Windows 365 Copilot Cortana phone.

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michaelt 4 hours ago | parent | next [-]

> The Windows phone didn't make it due to Microsoft failing to compete

As I recall Microsoft threw quite a lot of resources into Windows Phone.

My then-employer had apps for Android and Apple, and Microsoft literally paid for us to port it to Windows Phone. Microsoft brought Nokia, who had dominated the industry in the late 1990s and early 2000s.

And Microsoft was early to the mobile party too - you could get an iPaq H3660 running Microsoft Pocket PC 2000, seven years before the first iPhone. Keyboardless Fujitsu and Compaq tablets ran Windows XP Tablet PC Edition in 2003, seven years before the iPad.

They weren't as good as what came later. Chunky, fragile devices, resistive touchscreens, stylus input with a tiny on-screen keyboard, worse batteries, worse wifi, barely any mobile data. And at the time, $500 seemed hugely expensive compared to a normal phone, even if these days there are plenty of $1000 smartphones.

But there's an alternate reality where Microsoft had a 'first mover advantage' and captured a big slice of the smartphone-and-tablet market.

	▲	ghaff 3 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Zune was also... not good. I was given one. It was defective. I think I got a warranty replacement and gave it to a friend who basically never used it as far as I know. Nadella's Azure play basically saved Microsoft in my opinion. They totally blew mobile and desktop Windows and Office were declining markets and XBox was a sideshow.

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SoftTalker 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Windows phones were great at the time, everyone I knew who had a Lumia loved it, but yeah imagining what it would be like today makes me shudder.

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_old_dude_ 5 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Yes, and let's not forget Stephen Elop's 'Burning Platform' Memo

https://www.wsj.com/articles/BL-TEB-2031

	▲	The_President 5 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Paywalled for me

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skeeter2020 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

>> It was just the butt of too many jokes from influential people.

I loved my Windows phones (especially near the end when you were getting Pixel & Apple level hardware for pennies on the dollar), but is this really true? They had limited hardware partners (and the disaster with Nokia), lukewarm carrier deals, absolutely no apps, but who were these "influential people" who made fun of it? If anything it seemed more like no-one was even aware of it. I remember the little press they did get being quite positive on the devices & OS, while critical of the broader ecosystem, which seems fair.

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dessimus 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Given what Microsoft has done with the state of Windows with built-in telemetry, the attempts to add Recall, and now AI features they are adding to many customers dismay, you have them doing anything different with Windows Phone if it had gained traction than Apple and Google?

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Towaway69 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> A third ecosystem right now would have been amazing

Initially read this ending on … amazon

Please Universe, don’t give us the Amazon Phone as alternative.

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qiine 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Intel fumbling smartphone's cpu felt like this too.

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acheron 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Eh, Microsoft got bored of developing their own browser and just pushes Chromium on their users now. Probably they would have just turned Windows Phones into another Android too.

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mmooss 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Why not Blackberry as the third ecosystem? They used QNX, a respected realtime OS, and had a history of making appealing, highly functional phones.

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MrMorden 2 hours ago | parent [-]

Lack of applications. They decided to fix that by adding an Android subsystem, and nobody wanted to publish their Android applications to the Amazon store even with Amazon throwing gobs of money at publishers and only some APIs having been moved into Google Play Services.

	▲	mmooss an hour ago \| parent [-]
		Sure, but the same applies to Windows mobile. Why favor Windows over Blackberry mobile devices for a 3rd ecosystem?

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chistev 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

The phone was terrible.