What happened to Windows phones?

Microsoft managed to be THE dominant player on PCs, yet are almost invisible on smartphones that we’re all carrying everywhere. Believe it or not, it wasn’t too long ago that the windows mobile OS was actually the market leader on smartphones.

Early windows phone model…Has anyone ever seen this?

Market Leaders of Smartphones

Hard to believe eh? Before the original iPhone was released in 2007 the smartphone market was a mishmash of lots of different devices without any real must-have models among them and many of them ran Windows Mobile. So many in fact, that Microsoft owned nearly half of smartphone OS market share before Apple got into the game.

So what happened? Well even though Microsoft’s presence in smartphone lands was very significant, it was still a company whose bread & butter was software for traditional PCs and their management at the time wanted to be cautious about throwing themselves headfirst into mobile, sceptical as to whether it would catch on.

As a result, Microsoft didn’t devote enough resources to Windows Mobile which quickly became dated while at the same time Apple’s iOS rapidly gained popularity, thus making matters worse.

But hold on a minute, why did Google succeed where Microsoft didn’t?

By the time Microsoft decided it really should be focusing more attention on the mobile market Android had already become widespread and not only was it technologically superior to Microsoft’s outdated offering but it was also free, by contrast, Microsoft charged phone manufacturers for Windows Mobile slices just like you have to pay for a Windows license for your home PC today now Microsoft justified this because they thought Android was too bare-bones and would cause fragmentation of the market.

Sounds familiar? But, what actually happened is that, it gave the phone industry a freely available base. They included tons of Google services that people actually wanted to use.

So in 2010 Microsoft realizing the PC was losing ground to mobile devices decided to take the mobile competition seriously and replace Windows Mobile with Windows Phone OS but while reviews of the OS were actually pretty good, one of the main issues was that by this point half developers were already focused on iOS and Android so it became a chicken-and-egg problem.

There weren’t enough Windows Phone users for app developers even big ones like Instagram to bother to support the platform and it’s hard to attract users without likes of a YouTube app.

All this came to a head in 2014 when Microsoft bought Nokia’s phone division, hoping, naming a market power would give Windows the boost it needed.

Windows Phone was all over Nokia devices, but this backfired catastrophically. There was still no incentive for non-Nokia manufacturers to pay for Windows Phone licenses because now, not only was it not free, like Android but, their Windows Phone models would also have to compete against Nokia’s phone division, which was now owned by the SAME company, the one they were already paying.

RIP Windows Phones

They forgot the key feature being, App support and focused on squeezing out more money by placing their foot in all possible areas. So in 2017, the Windows Phone project was finally put out of this misery and Microsoft is now focusing its mobile efforts on cheaper laptops, Internet of Things and their digital assistant Cortana.

Feel free to leave comments about what you actually thought about windows phones? Stay tuned for more Unbiased tech content! Peace out✌