Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella admits giving up on Windows Phone and mobile was a mistake::Satya Nadella wrote off Microsoft’s Nokia phone business acquisition and now says the company’s exit from mobile was a mistake.
I really wanted window 10 phones to take off. Their development into their now defunct projects such as Continuum and Munchkin in my opinion could have jump started and sustained smartphones as a legitimate productivity PC. Imagine having a cellphone you can dock anywhere and have a full blown windows OS to do things on…. That’s where they were heading.
Alas, the best we got is Dex and stage manager both being cellphone OS solutions for work PC tasks.
Imagine a Lumia with one of these new Snapdragon 8cx cores in it that slides into a lapdock. Plenty of power for like 90% of people
Canonical also tried this a few years ago with their Ubuntu Touch crowdfunding and failed. Even released some convergent devices but that didn’t sell much. My impression is that although the concept is cool it is simply not appealing for the general audience
People want software and a functioning phone. Linux, in all its glory, is not for consumers.
The only hope we had was Microsoft, but that’s a joke in itself.
So unless someone wants to try to take on Google, and toss billions at it, it’s just one shitty android form after the other.
Android is Linux.
Linux, in all its glory, is not for consumers.
Guess we should tell everyone using Android phones and Chromebooks that their devices aren’t actually ready for consumers. Everyone with Steam Decks should get rid of them too.
Should probably also extend that to Unix. Maybe some day MacOS, iOS, PlayStation OS, Nintendo’s OS, etc will be ready for consumers
The issue isn’t Linux. The issue is that spearheading a new system in a highly competitive market is hard. Microsoft didn’t use Linux and they still failed, despite buying a massive well-loved brand and investing several billion
Shit, HTC and LG couldn’t stay alive, Sony are a shadow of their former selves in the phone market. And they didn’t even have to worry about pushing a whole new software experience.
Linux on Desktop is fine, because it’s had a long time to mature and improve.
The problem is that Linux mobile software is very immature, so it isn’t ready for a general audience yet.
Android is Linux
And why do we need waydroid in order to install android apk on postmarkedOS?
deleted by creator
Android does use the Linux kernel, they’re right, but the userspace is completely different and what I was referring to.
I was referring to standard GNU/Linux or Busybox/Linux, not the heavily modified Android.
Why are people downvoting ? Yes I love Linux too and all, but be honest. It is not relevant in the mass desktop market. That didn’t make it more easy for Ubuntu touch.
People are downvoting because it was an ill-informed comment.
The issue isn’t Linux. A large majority of phones use Linux, as do many other consumer devices. Saying “Linux isn’t for consumers” is extremely daft.
Ubuntu’s phone efforts didn’t fail because it ran Linux, it failed because almost all phone brands do unless they have Chinese backing.
Microsoft pumped billions into smartphones and failed. Was it because of Linux? No. Windows phone didn’t run Linux. So I guess by the above logic, Windows isn’t suitable for consumers?
Shit, HTC and LG are big names that died in the phone space despite not having the hard job of creating their own ecosystem. Samsung has walked back on Tizen and a bunch of other in-house stuff and started shifting back to Google services. Sony is only surviving by abandoning the mass market.
Because people like to downvote.
Just imagine all that extra data you could scrap for profit. $$$ all that spying and forcing ads into peoples faces … we all really missed out.
Microsoft minion when you stand up from your desk: noo, get back, geeet baaack
Cynical, but yeah, he probably had that in mind.
I’m stunned with how bad it was and why they hell they didn’t use the same strategy that made Windows popular… The apps.
My work back then gave me a Windows Phone. Very few of the apps I had on my Android phone was available for my work phone.
On top of that a lot of things simply didn’t work. One thing I still remember was that Alarm volume and Ring tone volume could not be adjusted individually.
The whole thing felt like they wanted to reinvent the wheel and started from absolute scratch without learning from the innovation in the past decade of mobile phones.
It’s sad, a third competitor in the smartphone space wouldn’t have been a bad thing.
The apps.
The industry just wasn’t interested. It’s too bad, the environment was excellent, and the phone was pretty slick. The HTC Sidekick will always be one of my favorite form factors for a phone.
There just wasn’t any interest in supporting a 3rd platform for most major companies.
I worked at a fortune 50 when the phone release and developed an app for it. The company looked at it and said they didn’t want to spend 50k to support it over the next year. The whole industry came to the same conclusion. Microsoft had to subsidize the 3rd party apps it got for the phone.
Lmao. Windows became popular because Apple was in shambles. Essentially they were the only game in town and literally because of that, overnight, they became THE operating system. Even with Jobs’ return and Apple’s meteoric rise, they were never able to even dent the monopoly they already built.
And they didn’t stop at personal computers. They innervated every business, post secondary institution, government sector and basically took over.
Microsoft is good at building and maintaining a monopoly. Outside of that, their actually products are third rate at best.
😢
This reminds me of Stephen Elop and how he ruined Nokia and turned them away from Linux so that Microsoft might buy Nokia for cheap.
resurrect it !
Where Microsoft really dropped the ball is their devices didn’t run windows apps. The surface RT was a disaster, and the phone wasn’t what the average consumer thought of when they thought of Microsoft. It’s be a herculean miracle to get a W7 lite x86 phone to run for more than a couple hours, but if they’d taken that approach, it would’ve changed the game.
Or they could’ve build a reliable x86 emulator on ARM, but that also would have been an engineering miracle.
Windows Phone was never going to work, but what I would have loved to see is
GoogleMicrosoft take on Android and dominate the market. Around that time, Microsoft were putting out some legitimately good hardware, and with some sane choices they could have been in a position now where they released a phone “powered by ChatGPT” and overpowered Google in a market they have been desperate to own for years.This is the best summary I could come up with:
Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella is the third chief executive of the software giant to admit the company has made some serious mobile mistakes.
Satya Nadella took over from former CEO Steve Ballmer in 2014 and, just over a year later, wrote off $7.6 billion related to Microsoft’s acquisition of the Nokia phone business.
Asked about a strategic mistake or wrong decision that he might regret, Nadella responds:
Former Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer was also slow to respond to Android and the iPhone threat, focusing the company’s efforts on Windows Mobile while famously laughing at the iPhone, calling it the “most expensive phone in the world and it doesn’t appeal to business customers because it doesn’t have a keyboard.”
“I regret there was a period in the early 2000s when we were so focused on what we had to do around Windows [Vista] that we weren’t able to redeploy talent to the new device called the phone,” explained Ballmer.
The company is constantly updating its Phone Link app to link Android and even iPhone handsets to Windows, and Microsoft has a close relationship with Samsung to ensure its mobile Office apps are preinstalled on Samsung’s Android handsets.
The original article contains 378 words, the summary contains 196 words. Saved 48%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!
Yes.
