This past weekend, Microsoft made official what was already known for years: the Windows Phone mobile operating system is dead. There’ll be no further development, no miraculous Windows 10 Mobile revivals, and no further attempts to compete with the overwhelming duopoly of Apple’s iOS and Google’s Android. The new Microsoft, led by Satya Nadella, prefers collaboration over competition — or at least that’s the choice the company tells itself it has made in abandoning its thwarted mobile OS venture.
But the overall failure of Windows Phone masks a series of smaller successes and advances, which Microsoft and its hardware partners have never received enough credit for. At its outset in 2010, Windows Phone was the boldest and most original reimagining of what a smartphone can be after Apple’s iPhone introduction three years prior. Unlike Android, Windows Phone was not a re-creation of the iOS icon grid; also unlike Android, Windows Phone ran fast and fluid on very basic hardware.
Given how few opportunities we’re likely to have to talk about Windows Phone in the future, I thought I’d take a look back at some of my highlights from covering Microsoft’s ill-fated mobile operating system over the years.
October 2010: A radically different phone OS
It was almost exactly seven years ago, on October 11th, 2010, that noted tech geek Stephen Fry stood in front of a captive audience in London and declared himself thrilled to be endorsing the new Windows Phone OS. A longtime iPhone enthusiast, Fry was just giddy with the little “moments of delight” that the refreshingly new Windows Phone provided him. He had good reason to be enthusiastic: the original Windows Phone of those days was radically different and in many ways ahead of its time.
The chromeless, distilled interface of WP7 was a million miles away from the skeuomorphism dominating Apple’s phones and Samsung’s copycat efforts. Where an iPhone served you static icons, a Windows Phone offered tiles with live information on them: a calendar surfacing your next appointments, a messaging app presenting snippets of texts, a phone app with your last missed call, and so on. When you look at subsequent “hub” pages on Android — things like HTC’s BlinkFeed or the Google Now cards with contextually relevant information and news — know that at least some of their inspiration came from what Microsoft did with Windows Phone. Or, at least, what Microsoft envisioned. I think the biggest misstep from Microsoft was in its failure to follow through on its bold vision and novel design sensibility; Windows Phone was compromised and watered down in significant ways after initial feedback deemed it too unfamiliar and alien to mobile users.
It’s easy to now forget just how fast and responsive Windows Phone felt relative to anything Android could come up with. Microsoft’s on-screen keyboard was also vastly superior. And if you wanted to talk about the most elegant system for providing notifications or useful information on the lock screen, you had to talk about Microsoft’s solution. In some of the most important and pervasive ways, Windows Phone was the iPhone’s equal — primarily because Microsoft adopted an Apple-like approach of tightly controlling the user experience across all devices and manufacturers. It was closed-shop, walled-garden software production, and it paid off with a great degree of polish and refinement.
November 2011: Industrial design revolution
The contributions of the Windows Phone ecosystem to the wider field of smartphone design have never been properly recognized. The platform launched with some gorgeous and truly unique phones like the Samsung Omnia 7 with a 4-inch OLED display, Dell Venue Pro with a slide-out keyboard, and HTC 7 Surround with a big integrated speaker and kickstand. But it was the following year, when HTC introduced the Windows Phone 8X and 8S and Nokia launched the Lumia 800, that we really saw Windows Phone push out in front in the industrial design stakes.
I reviewed those phones, and they were among the most handsome and innovative designs of their time. Nokia was plagiarizing itself by exploiting the lovely pillow-shaped Nokia N9 design, but that didn’t matter: the fact was that for that one moment in late 2011, Windows Phone had some of the finest hardware around. (The contemporary iPhone, the 4S, was nice, but it was a reiteration of a year-old design and it had a smaller screen.)
Microsoft was able to launch Windows Phone 7 with a battery of differentiated designs from every aspiring global phone maker, and a year later it followed up with the best designs from Nokia and HTC. Nokia staked its entire future on Windows Phone, and HTC invested heavily in making the Windows Phone 8X and 8S — which Microsoft designated “Signature Windows Phone” devices — as good and as pretty as they were. This was a pivotal moment for the mobile OS as a whole, because the eventual failure of these phones to dent the iPhone and Android’s market dominance is what led to a spiraling loss of faith among Microsoft’s hardware partners and the eventual dissolution of Nokia as a phone maker.
July 2013: Phone cameras take a step forward
Windows Phone disturbed our preconceptions about good user interfaces when it launched. The OS then gave us some of the nicest phone hardware we’d seen. And before its star started to fade, it managed to move the needle on camera technology, too, courtesy of the Lumia 1020 and its iconic round camera bump. The Lumia 1020 was a more mainstream version of the hardcore Nokia 808 PureView running Symbian. Both phones had 41-megapixel camera sensors, and both marked significant advances in mobile imaging. The 808 is still such a good camera that I can dig it out of a drawer and use it as a reliable point-and-shoot that would be shamed by no modern smartphone. The subsequent Lumia 1020 splits the difference by not being quite as good at the imaging stuff, but having a vastly superior and more modern operating system.
Windows Phone had a variety of issues undermining its chances of popular success, but the essential hardware aspects of good design, great imaging, and reliable battery life were rarely in question.
August 2013: The YouTube blockade
If you’re wondering why none of Microsoft’s many strenuous Windows Phone efforts ultimately paid off, the key answer lies in the platform’s chronic failure to attract third-party app developers. Every time Nokia launched a new Windows Phone, it had to dodge and duck the question of when there’ll be an Instagram app for the OS. Even as Microsoft was beating Google at providing a smoother and slicker first-party app experience, Google was winning handily in having the more essential apps and the more enthusiastic third-party ecosystem. In an alternate universe, where Microsoft’s Bing was superior to Google search, and where Hotmail had retained its popularity and Internet Explorer had remained the dominant web browser, there’s a chance we could all be talking about Android’s demise right now.
Perhaps the biggest missing app for Microsoft was YouTube, and that was no accident. There’s a long history of hostilities between Google and Microsoft over YouTube’s presence on Windows Phone, but ultimately I think Google just didn’t want to give WP the chance to become a legitimate Android rival. Most internet use is now mobile, and YouTube occupies a huge chunk of our time while we’re on our phones, so any platform that’s missing a proper YouTube app is at a massive disadvantage. Call it simplistic, but I suspect similar reasons lie behind Google’s decision to yank YouTube off the Amazon Echo Show: it’s another example of a direct competitor to a Google product (Google Home, in that case) being hamstrung by the absence of a YouTube app.
April 2014: Taking over Nokia
By 2014, Windows Phone had pretty much exhausted its supply of good news and was morphing into a learning exercise for both Microsoft and the wider mobile industry. Having alienated HTC and Samsung early on by seeming to favor Nokia, Microsoft bit the bullet and just acquired the storied Finnish phone manufacturer. What followed were a series of rebranding and repositioning efforts and the first Microsoft logos embossed on modern-era smartphones. But Microsoft couldn’t alter the trajectory that had been set by its insurmountable app deficit and it just kept trying to appeal on the basis of the traditional Nokia strengths of imaging and design. What ended up happening was that Android vendors like Samsung finally woke up to the importance of those factors, and eventually they just outdid the former Nokia at its own game.
One of the crucial issues that Microsoft had before its Nokia takeover was a conflict over what should be prioritized. Microsoft had the iPhone in its sights, whereas Nokia was keen to drag the power- and resource-efficient Windows Phone down to lower price points. Nokia was trying to capitalize on its head start of having brand equity in the rapidly developing markets of India and the rest of the Asian subcontinent, while Microsoft was thinking of ways to position itself against its oldest rival. The frustration on both sides bubbled over into public disclosures about the pace of progress, which is predictable considering the two companies were advancing toward different goals.
The Microsoft lesson for companies like Google, which just acquired HTC’s smartphone team, is multidimensional. Firstly, adopting the Apple-like approach of tight control over the user experience really did pay off in making Windows Phone feel consistently smooth and cohesive. But secondly, if a software vendor is going to piss off its hardware partners, it might as well go all the way instead of tip-toeing around the matter. Microsoft wanted to have Nokia as its de facto in-house Windows Phone design operation, but it still wanted Samsung and HTC pouring money into devising their own devices. It was greedy, and it didn’t pan out. Microsoft could have saved itself many headaches by buying Nokia much earlier and setting a single, unified strategy for where Windows Phone was going to go. Defeating both iOS at the high end and Android at the low end was always an unreasonably ambitious objective.
August 2015: The 2.5 percent
So what’s happened in the three years since Microsoft bought Nokia? Well, in 2015 the smartphone market was confirmed to be a total iPhone / Android duopoly, with Gartner reporting 96.8 percent of all phones sold having one or the other OS. Microsoft claimed 2.5 percent of the market then, and it’s only been going down since. Tom Warren, The Verge’s most resolute Windows Phone stalwart, raised the white flag at the end of 2014. The fact that Windows Phone endured as long as it has is mostly a matter of Microsoft’s deep resources to support its zombie corpse.
But even as we look back on this entire venture as an unsuccessful attempt to offer an alternative to Apple and Google, we shouldn’t lose sight of the positive legacy it has left behind. The mobile industry would have been much poorer without the considerable resources Microsoft and its partners poured into building a third viable ecosystem. There are many lessons for others to benefit from and many hardware innovations to be inspired by. Windows Phone should be remembered as one of the best failures the tech industry has produced.
Comments
i actually liked Windows mobile but well… now it’s iOS
By Nicholas Platts on 10.10.17 9:48am
Yeah, it’s a shame.
I believe Satya decided as far back as early 2014 that they would be scrapping the platform. Steve Ballmer would have made a much better CEO, at least when it comes to pushing Microsoft’s consumer devices and services.
Giving up on mobile will affect them across everything, be it PC or enterprise. The smartphone will play nice and integrate with MacOS and ChromeOS, but not Windows.
2020 = Microsoft solely purveyor of cloud services and Office 365, diminishing on desktop and laptop
By StatisticalAnomaly on 10.10.17 11:40am
Such a bold prediction with desktop ownership plummeting.
By wkm001 on 10.10.17 12:03pm
You’re making it sound as if WP even had a chance back in 2014… the battle and the war were already lost. Just a shame they didn’t can it sooner.
By Nmco8 on 10.10.17 7:10pm
I can’t believe that nobody has posted this iconic photo of the iPhone funeral held by Microsoft employees on their campus when they launched Windows Phone:
This sums up their hubris from birth and all the misadventures since then.
By pboardman on 10.11.17 11:51am
It may seem that this is where Nadella’s Microsoft is heading. At least considering the fact that they ejected them from wearables (Band) and mobile (WM and hardware). HoloLens is also getting long in the tooth, with no update in sight.
But on the other hand, they do work on the desktop, both in hardware (Surface) and software (W10). They also explore Mixed Reality, which is potentially a huge future market. But how persistent they will be is everyone’s guess. One thing seems for certain though, MS is not credible when it comes to announcements. That WM saga is one of the best examples, with a myriad of promises, and now – nothing.
By HeadPack on 10.10.17 8:42pm
I think they already lost mixed reality to Apple. At least at the consumer market.
By BelikovSergey on 10.11.17 3:15am
Mobile augmented reality, yes. The mixed reality (as in both AR and VR combined) and VR markets still have something to play for.
By cqdemal on 10.11.17 5:38am
The actual mixed reality from MS is VR… the platform name does not represent what they are trying to sell… they call it mixed reality head set but are VR headsets like oculus and hive, etc… so based on that, its already a big fail… I was looking for AR in mixed reality… guess its another missed opportunity from to MS to show-off new headsets capable of "VR"…. like we just had 2 years ago.
By AndrewGa on 10.11.17 8:31am
On the mobile front maybe, but I still think people are up in the air when it come to serious mixed reality, not just motion screens, and video loops stamped with a mixed reality moniker.
By morning coffee on 10.11.17 1:05pm
HoloLens is long in the tooth on purpose.
MS decided to skip version two (which they had already made considerable investment) and just right to version three on the hardware.
It is due end of 2018 early 2019.
By MikeZeitnerIsOn on 10.11.17 10:40am
Ballmer’s leadership is the reason that it failed in the first place.
By EvilAvatar on 10.11.17 12:12pm
Ballmer is part of the reason Win fell this far behind.
By morning coffee on 10.11.17 1:02pm
Coincidentally, I just brushed back up my mom’s lumia 520 (my old 525 wouldn’t start). It’s running Lumia Denim and the memories of my first windows phone came bursting back. It’s a shame that it has to end.
By bhargavbuddy on 10.11.17 3:48am
Nokia had great hardware for it’s time but dumb software. They bet on windows and that was a big mistake. Going android and maybe they would have still be in business. If samsung did it, think they could’ve done it also.
But arrogance and ego from both Microsoft and Nokia leadership led to complete failure.
Too late too little. That’s it.
By raresh on 10.11.17 8:36am
I only think Win failed because of it not producing a viable internet experience, apps don’t matter if you could use the web.
By morning coffee on 10.11.17 1:07pm
Microsoft did basically everything before Apple and Google. A relevant example is its Windows Hello (powered by Intel) facial recognition software, which is both excellent and years old at this point. I will continue using my Lumia 950 XL until it eventually stops working, because as much as I love the look of the new devices coming out, I just can’t see myself willingly giving up the wonderful, functional, industrial design of Windows 10 Mobile.
My hope is that someday soon, Panos Panay is up on that stage, pumped about the future of mobile computing on a new ARM-powered, Windows Core OS and C-Shell enabled, Mixed Reality focused Surface device.
By gustavchirps on 10.10.17 9:48am
Pumped they can be, but sadly, everyday life today necessitates apps and services to interact with gadgets, cars, banks, governments and much more.
You can’t just get the WORLD to suddenly cater to your platform, not unless you are bringing absolutely disruptive innovation to the table or there somehow evolved an open source stack platform on which every major native app is built or can be easily converted to
By StatisticalAnomaly on 10.10.17 11:45am
Well there is one chance. Windows Core OS will run full windows apps on ARM and since Chrome is going to emulate Android apps then you can assume that you might have the best of both worlds in that scenario…
By Pablo GH on 10.10.17 11:58am
Isn’t it ironic that Microsoft tried to do just what you said first with moving to windows mobile 10 which shares the same core code base as windows, meaning if your making a modern windows app you could easily make for both, then it went to the app bridges to ios, legacy windows, and android to allow apps to be easily converted to the new windows but..people crucified on every little thing.Think about it.We just didn’t allow windows phone to improve on the what it brought to the market now we have to pay a premium for every else to bring them.
Truth is windows phone didn’t’ "die" on its own. It was murdered, murdered not just by MS doing what was the inevitable thing to do but by competitors(mostly google who in hindsight have been more antagonistic to Microsoft on windows phone than Microsoft have been to google on android),murdered by journalist,by consumers, by app developers(which were mostly the consumer facing apps,commercial apps were present banks,payment, companies etc. released apps and then had to stop support because..no growth obviously).Everyone took their turn stabbing it in the back.I think everyone should feel bad about what happened to windows phone(probable won’t but we should), and we should bear the consequences.
By sfZero on 10.10.17 12:48pm
You can’t come late to a market and expect people to latch onto you unless your product is vastly superior or vastly cheaper. Windows phones were neither.
By Mike_dt on 10.10.17 3:47pm
They did the cheaper thing later, when they should have done it sooner. At the jump if they had lower price points compared to Android and iOS they definitely could have had some marketshare still. As phones are getting more expensive Windows Phone could have been that cheaper alternative to the junk Android phone that is less than $120 and will be abandoned long before it stops being sold. Nokia still had a presence in emerging markets and everything but they didn’t capitalize on it at all. It all comes down to they didn’t provide enough time or vision to it.
By Tratia895 on 10.10.17 8:14pm
Oh get a grip man. It’s a product from a giant, international company. Nobody should feel bad for their role in Windows Phone failing. Not consumers, not developers, not Google – no matter how much you want a big bad villain for your story. A product is not owed anything from anyone, certainly not guilt from those that took no interest in it. As a product, Windows Phone had some great qualities and some terrible qualities. The reality is that it just couldn’t generate enough interest from developers/3rd party companies, nor enough attention from the public. So it failed, like countless products before it and countless products will do after it.
By Sinister-Kid on 10.11.17 7:14am
if the imagery is not to your taste then i can’t say I’m sorry, but what I’m trying to say is this windows phone died because of several reasons none of which have to do with the OS or the benefits of the OS specifically. Which is why i invoked that imagery.Contrary to your belief I’m not trying to paint any one black and white big bad villain, no no no, I’m trying to paint ‘life’… the lies, the mistakes, bad decisions, the visions,the bullies, the thugs figuratively speaking.I am just trying to give a visual where no one person is to blame, and the vicious cycles that had to occur for it to be this way, and of course to keep it succinct. If the cap fits let them wear it.I don’t want to tie guilt into anything but the consequences of our actions are being realized and they are all interconnected.
But i guess it didn’t work for you so here is a longer reason for my imagery.I really don’t want to get into what are long conversations, it takes too long and goes no where but anyway if you simply aren’t willing to listen if you just want to see black and white…You don’t have to read past this but here goes, i hope this doesn’t ‘disappear’
Yes i stick by my original comment we should feel bad,because windows phone was a capable OS that was constantly dogged by negative press, ignoring it’s features, which in turn fueled toxic consumers, and turned potential consumers away, this led to developers shunning the operating system, allowing other developers with less than ideal intentions to handicap the system leading to Microsoft to constantly having to restart the OS, which in turn added to the negative press about lack of progression of features, features which consumers have been available to us all this time apparently, for which we freely give data to progress functionality ,to which companies send out event invites and press kits about, and now tell us we have to pay a premium for because that’s are all that is left to differentiate between competitors, from which the press now say is do to commodification, and not due to a lack of competition of services and features because we failed to call out the companies with less ideal intentions[ which is reflected in windows phone market share,don’t look at the 2.5% global number look at the fact the only place it was seeing growth at all was in Asia because android is essentially the 3rd and 4th OS due to the heavy forking of android in Asia there’s no need for windows phone] because as fanboys and fangirls we allowed our selves to get into this toxic idea that any one company is much better at [x] feature that would have been available to us had we just allowed time for hardware and software to make our OS more capable…wait a minute..I’m just going in circles aren’t i?
This is the cycle windows phone got caught in, and now it is no more, too bad tho now the dead talks all the leaks and canceled things it would have been a fun time to be a gadget lover at all tiers. But, it’s dead jim, and google and apple send their regards.
By sfZero on 10.11.17 5:04pm
This is such revisionist crap from the Microsoft crowd. We heard the same thing about Zune, and it wasn’t true then either. Microsoft failed because they made a bad product. Period.
People gush about the OS design of Windows Phone, but nothing about the design has ever appealed to anyone outside of niche nerd circles like people on The Verge.
By BB-8 on 10.12.17 6:01pm