A Reddit user that claims to have become a Nokia engineer in the time Microsoft acquired the company’s struggling mobile business has outlined four chief factors behind the failure of Windows Phone.
There are a ton of reasons why Microsoft lost the struggle for cellular, including its approach to anti Windows Phone, spouses such as Samsung not launching cutting-edge Windows Phone handsets, also Microsoft’s failure to pull app developers. He emphasizes that he wasn’t a”big period from Espoo”, Nokia’s Finnish headquarters, but only a”regular software development scientist” in the Boston office.
The engineer joined Nokia at a certain stage following the 2011 deal with Microsoft to place Windows Phone 7 on all of its telephones and would later work on the program store for the Nokia X, the very first Android telephone that Nokia launched ahead of its acquisition by Microsoft.
“There are lots of well-known aspects which caused WP’s passing, and none of them alone took it down, but here are the ones who stood out to me,” the engineer composed in the Reddit article.
While Microsoft’s failure to make Android would turn into Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates’ greatest regret, the engineer considers Microsoft underestimated Google along with the worth of services such as Gmail, hunt, and Maps on cellular. Google in 2012 ceased financing efforts to make its apps for Windows Phone 8 and Windows 8.
“Obviously Apple was red hot and Microsoft knew that, but Google was new to the OS company and they weren’t taken seriously enough. Android was pretty rough then, but the real worth was Google’s providers; when Google cut Microsoft off of YouTube, Maps, Gmail, etc, it really made WP look cheap.”
The next mistake was a”botched Windows 8″ and the stigma above Microsoft’s Metro interface, which arguably functioned well on mobile using Windows Phone 7 touchscreen devices but was not well received if Microsoft put it on the desktop in Windows 8.
“Before Windows 8, WP had a lot of people’s curiosity. Following Windows 8, people associated the two together as bad products though the teams were fairly independent, and things done poorly on Windows 8 weren’t reflective of the way the encounter was on WP. Despite Windows 10, the stigma against Metro never recovered,” the prior Nokia engineer composed.
Microsoft itself also still had a bad reputation, the engineer argues, due its activities over the last decade as the dominant tech firm.
“In the time it was still horrible and it supposed that the young guys who grew up hating Microsoft were creating the big startups for other programs,” the engineer notes.
Ultimately, by 2014, cellular users had already aligned themselves with iOS or Android.
“Even though WP got apps and whatever else it lacked, there just wasn’t a compelling reason to change. Even now I sense the amount switching between iOS and Android is pretty low.”
Interestingly, as the prior Nokia engineer notes, under the 2011 deal with Microsoft, Nokia was not meant to launch a Android phone.
But, the business got around that by categorizing its Android apparatus for a feature phone compared with its high-end Lumia devices on Windows Phone.
“As the Nokia X was a secret, they couldn’t just go out and promote Android openings, instead hiring just Java engineers and reassigning a few internally,” the engineer writes.
“Eventually we got place there as things got closer to launch. I worked on the X app shop, which was the first I did for Android. For all the negatives on the consumer side, coding for WP was always superior than Android.”
