Steve Ballmer was an underrated CEO

Windows phone was damn good and was growing in popularity when Nadella came in and killed it. When you are #3 in a market, you need persistence to win. One cannot expect immediate, massive profits in a saturated market. Yet, Windows phone by itself was a growth multiplier for Windows which Nadella annihilated in order to turn Microsoft into a cloud & ad services company.

> you need persistence to win.

You also need a plan. How would Windows Phone displace either Apple or Android?

It wouldn't and it wouldn't need to. The decision was still very likely wrong, especially transparent after Apple proved with silicon that ARM platforms can be that competitive. Windows wasn't ready here and platform interop wasn't at all it strength.

If Windows phones would have had an emulated x86 mode, many people would have bought it instantly due to the momentum that now steadily decreases.

There can be solid business revenue if you are "just" #3 and the experience with development is very valuable. Although it is true that Microsoft and hardware has always been turbulent, with partners or without. Sometimes they simply created the best products in their class with a lot of margin, sometimes they basically sold scrap.

Just a spitball idea, but rather than focusing on the consumer market, they could've been the new blackberry for businesses (that give employees phones). Native active directory and group policy integration would be a good solution for the myriad of third party apps/services/devices that attempt to control the other phones.

The entire mobile market was immature back then, people didn't expect much interoperability and Windows Mobile 7 Nokias were slick and faster than iPhone or Android. They could have become the "contrarians luxury" if you didn't want to just get an iPhone. A bunch of hardcore Microsoft fan developers were gearing up to develop for Windows Mobilet dotnet when Microsoft changed the APIs with Mobile 8 (IIRC) and this dedicated bunch of developers just dropped the platform and just embraced Android or iOS instead.

For sure. Enterprise mobile was not really a thing back then. (Laptops with VPN was state of the art.) Microsoft could have organically owned the enterprise mobile market but chose not to.

Open source has a lot of momentum in Microsoft now but it wasn't the case when Windows Phone was released.

Had they made it open source, it would have been a different story with Android and Windows Phone fighting to win the OEMs.

But that ship has sailed. Unless there's a paradigm shift in smartphones (doubtful), we're stuck with Android and iOS for the foreseeable future.

Except from a project management standpoint, if you don’t have a vision for a project, the people on that team would get up and leave. And there was no short term vision for the phone in the face of android and iPhone. The long term vision did not have team buy-in.

And then further the phone was a distraction for all of the other teams who were expected in someway to provide some software that would work on there as well as android and iPhone.

I agree that the phone would have been great … at some point. But in an MBA world, it was a liability

Windows Phone is surely symptomatic of Balmer's milking the cow rather than innovating approach. A smart phone is not a small desktop computer - it needed a complete rethink of user interface as Apple had done.

It's also a bit strange that the success of Windows was based on the ubiquity of clone PCs rather than single vendor, yet Microsoft instead tried to follow Apple here and let Google become the "clone PC" (Android phone) OS supplier.

I can't fault Balmer for at least trying to get a slice of the pie by belatedly putting out me-too products like Bing and Azure, but it's precisely because of Microsoft/Balmer missing the importance of the internet that it was put in position of being follower rather than leader.

Microsoft is really a bit like Intel in having totally dominated a product category, but then having missed on most of the major industry trends they might have been expected to lead on (for Microsoft, internet, mobile and AI; for Intel mobile, gaming and AI). They are lucky to have had a second chance with Nadella who seems much more in tune with industry trends, willing to rapidly pivot, and who seems to have made a masterful move with their OpenAI partnership in buying time to recover from an early lack of focus on AI/ML.

The user interface did have a complete re-think. Windows phone popularized tiles and live tiles which was not just innovative, but an order of magnitude easier and more ergonomical compared to icons, esp for older people. The comforting common-cross-app back button, the metro UI, the smooth performance, ability to store all apps on SD card, best phone keyboard of that era, integration with windows PC - they had the bare-bones down fine. But simply gave up after a few years, instead of incrementally improving.

I thought it was a bad mistake to bow, kneel and surrender the smart-phone market space. Today, I am fully convinced it was a critical, life-threatening mistake as more folks move to the Apple ecosystem - buying both iPhones, Macbooks and Apple Watches because of a fully-integrated ecosystem. The funny thing it was Microsoft who popularized Continuity, but after they gave up due to lack of willpower, it was Apple who took over, executed better and won. Really frustrating to see the state of Windows OS and device market today.

> for Microsoft, internet, mobile and AI

I don't think they missed AI boat. Their culture would not have allowed them to create OpenAI, but they were fast to leverage their moat and push AI into their office and windows suites and azure. Hell, they are even trying to catch up with search using AI and are trying to push Azure for various AI startups and stuff.

MSFT rarely leads on anything - arguably even Windows is something they created being inspired by something else, while not going deep into hardware. Which what became the undoing of IBM. They are much better at being second. Azure - they were behind AWS, but not as late as Google.

I bet with Satya, even with mobile they would have grabbed Nokia much earlier and pushed Windows Mobile before Android took off.

AWS missed AI boat though.

> Had they made it open source

That would have necessitated open sourcing Windows

Amazon have a very close relationship with Anthropic, which seems like a good match (Anthropic focus on business use), and win-win. Anthropic gets access to the compute they need, and Amazon get AI to integrate into their AWS offerings.

I don't know the contractual basis of the relationship, but it seems this has to be pretty long term and strategic. A significant part of the competitive advantage of one AI vendor over another comes down to inference cost, which in turm comes down to customizing the model architecture for the hardware it is running on, which in this case either is, or will be, Amazon's home grown Graviton processors.

The problem with Amazon is not their closeness to Anthropic, but more of the fact their moat is not big enough to integrate AI in a way MSFT can. Even their Azure services somehow feels natural with AI support.

I don't know if Satya predicted it or not, but their push into open source and Github acquisition were very helpful for AI.

I had a Windows Phone for a while. I still miss the tiles.

Windows Phone was indeed damn good. I held on to my WP 10 phone a lot longer than anyone sane would have. However, the only growth for WP was in the negative direction. There were no apps for WP because of past compatibility breaks, Google was sabotaging access to their services, carriers and OEMs were unhappy because of low sales volumes of WP phones. Windows Phone was already very clearly dead before Nadella took over.

I could also imagine organisations like the military and police paying vast amounts for phones that could be governed like corporate PCs.

Even now, Microsoft has a great advantage over Google and Apple in getting meetings with the procurement people in those organisations.

That's what Blackberry did and it didn't work, despite great technology (QNX) and good Android compatibility.