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this post was submitted on 05 Jun 2023
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Technology
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Yea it was clearly their IBM PC moment.
I don’t recall how bad it was when they cut mobile, but I wonder if in hindsight it would have made sense to just keep going as it was clearly the next platform war and surely MS were always going to have a potential foothold through desktop integration
If i remember, what killed windows phone was the lack of 3rd party apps which is especially ironic since they now own the entire developer experience. They have vscode, github, azure, they could have made windows mobile a compile target and get more apps if they played the long game.
Apple is dipping their toes into XR, I wonder if microsoft will follow them later for another chance of the mobile market
@darkkite @maegul From the outside, it also seems like there was some corporate politics involved.
Apple was making its comeback thanks to Mac OSX, the iMac, the iPod, the iPhone, and the iPad.
Samsung was toying with its own OS (Tizen), apps, and online services (Bixby).
Google responded by toying with hardware itself, including Glass, Nest, and at one point even buying Motorola.
So it looked like all the big tech companies were going to try to copy Apple by trying to own the full tech stack.
The then-CEO of Microsoft, Steve Ballmer, responded by trying to reposition his firm as a "devices and services" company. So he ended up with the XBox, Zune, Kinect, Kin, and Surface.
Then he went all-in with a takeover of Nokia.
Soon afterwards, Ballmer stood aside, and Satya Nadella took over.
Satya wanted to reposition Microsoft as a cloud-first company, competing against Google and AWS rather than Apple.
He kept the XBox and Surface, let the rest bleed money for a couple of quarters, wrote off their value as a loss, and then killed it off.