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That time when Microsoft bought and killed Nokia phone unit
(www.theregister.com)
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this post was submitted on 05 May 2024
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It ended up being a bad call but at the time Android only had 2 years in the market and trusting the leading OS company to manufacture a proper mobile product wasn’t a crazy idea. Microsoft just completely mismanaged the whole phone thing and took down Nokia with it.
If I remember correctly the approach was so anti-google that you couldn’t even watch youtube on Windows Phones.
Google sabotaged Windows Phone to protect Android. They refused to serve even standard Google web apps to the WP browser, instead relegating users to years-old mobile versions that looked and worked terribly. You could literally edit the user string on the Windows browser and get the modern, perfectly functional version. Then there was the constant YouTube fuckery where Google wouldn’t make a YouTube app for them, then wouldn’t let them make their own app either. The entire point was to starve the system to kill it in the cradle and on some level, it probably worked.
Looking at the fact that Google is under intense anticompetitive scrutiny now and has been egregiously destroying evidence every chance they get shows that this isn’t out of character for them.
Very much like how they deliberately fucked up Google search results on Firefox for Android.
100%. They went from understanding the perils of success to exemplifying the worst of it. Don’t be (caught being) evil.
Microsoft also had a decent credibility with mobile device OS’s. They made OS’s for PDA’s like Windows CE, Windows Mobile, Pocket PC… those were all on some very capable devices.
God, I miss my Compaq Ipaq Pocket PC. That thing was a fucking beast.
Sort of. Google and Microsoft really weren’t on good terms back then (relatively speaking). Both were competing for the mobile OS market, and Microsoft ran this whole „Don’t get Scroogled“ campaign to demote Android.
Naturally, Google did not offer any of their apps for Windows phone - i.e. no Google maps or YouTube. Microsoft then made their own YouTube client for windows phone which was an okay app. However Google wasn’t happy with this and had them take down the app and replace it with their own version instead.
The problem is that Google’s YouTube app for windows phone was so embarrassingly bad that after countless 1-star reviews they decided to pull the app from the windows phone store, effectively leaving the platform with no YouTube app at all. There was at least one third party client which was decent, but there was never another official one after that IIRC.