alt Hacker NewsA lot of people attribute the Windows Phone switch as the end of Nokia but that would only be true if people did not like Windows Phone. On the contrary, Windows phones were loved by their users. And I say this as a person who used Symbian Belle, then Meego (I had the piano white Nokia N9!) and then Windows Phone.
Meego was fantastic, but Windows Phone was fantastic as well. And arguably it had more reach: modern Windows OS was working on mobile phones, tablets, wearables, Xbox and even AR glasses like HoloLens. A developer's dream, you write once and it works on every form factor which has Windows. You could even plug your Windows phone to a docking station and you would have a Windows desktop!
What killed Nokia was being late to the game, and what killed Windows Phone was first the lack of apps (which was getting better but very slowly) and Satya not being happy with low margins and slow progress, compared to Azure.
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Windows Phone wasn't really good, because it inherited desktop Windows' bad developer experience and constantly broken promises. The write once run everywhere story wasn't as rosy as you remember. Windows Phone wasn't good, wasn't getting better fast enough, and regressed due to some unforced errors later in life.
And I say that as someone with a (blue) N9 and Lumia 900 within a few feet of me in a drawer.
Did Windows Phone solve the problem that Windows Mobile had where libraries like the .net runtime were incomplete? I remember trying to build an app for Windows Mobile 6.0 and not being able to use third party libraries because some of the basic functions of Windows were missing on mobile. I'm not even talking about UI, more like networking and other backend features.
Yes, I had really cheap Windows Phone, and prior to Windows 10 Mobile, Windows were super fast and the phone was really fun to use. After Win 10 release, it become unusable - slow, rendering issues, etc.
This was such a short sighted move - with a phone platform and HoloLens they could have built their version of meta glasses and been able to capture all that real world vision for building ai models.
Even if one assumes that Windows Phone was wonderful (and a long WP7 user, I’m sympathetic to this view), it still doesn’t follow that Windows Phone didn’t kill Nokia.
- Windows Phone had no brand value. It didn’t add to the Nokia brand. It detracted from it
- Windows Phone allowed very minimal UI customization. This meant that Nokia could add little to no Nokia specific functionality
- Windows Phone allowed minimal hardware customization. This meant all Nokia phones looked and behaved like cheap Chinese phones for less than half the price
- Windows Phone was closed source, which meant Nokia engineers could not add either hardware or software functionality beyond whar Windows Phone already supported.
- As part of the Windows phone transition, MS required Nokia to kill their own OS development. Switching to Windows Phone was a hard 1 way turn.
The alternative to Nokia at the time wasn’t Windows Phone vs Meego. It was Windows Phone vs Meego vs Android vs Android + Meego.
The obvious, both contemporaneous and in hindsight, choice was to go with Android which and continue Meego dev on the side as a fallback. Android brought Nokia up to speed on the hardware and app ecosystem side, while allowing them to innovate on the hardware side and using their brand + unique designs + hardware quality to be a leading Android developer.