Microsoft My Phone

» see myphone.microsoft.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the goodbye ~

The phones around me in 2009 were Nokias. Windows Mobile in turkey was a business handset, the kind of thing a company bought for a sales team, and the rest of us were on Symbian waiting to see what android would turn into. So My Phone is a service I can describe accurately and never once logged into, which is roughly the relationship most of the world had with Windows Mobile 6.5 by then.

It was announced on 16 february 2009 in Barcelona, at the Mobile World Congress where Steve Ballmer also showed Windows Marketplace for Mobile. My Phone was the free half of that pair. You installed a client on a Windows Mobile 6 handset and it synced your contacts, your calendar, your text messages, your browser favorites and your photos to a password protected web portal, using your Windows Live ID to get in and Windows Live servers to hold it. It ran in twenty five languages.

That list is worth reading twice, because in 2009 losing a phone still meant losing the numbers in it. There was no ambient assumption that anything you typed into a handset existed anywhere else. Microsoft also sold a premium package for a one time $4.99 in the us, which added the features you want once a phone is already gone: make it ring at full volume, or lock it from the web.

~ the chronicle ~

~ the day it died ~

The end was announced on 10 june 2011 and executed in stages. On 7 august the handsets stopped syncing. On 6 october the website went offline. Microsoft moved what it could convert into SkyDrive, which meant contacts as CSV, calendar entries as ICS, text messages as plain text and photos as image files, all of it dumped into a folder rather than into anything that could read it back.

Everything else was your problem. Videos, music, documents and browser favorites were not migrated at all, and the notice told users to back those up to a computer themselves before the date. For anyone who had treated My Phone as the only copy, which was the entire pitch of the service, that was a hard sentence to read. Microsoft kept the archives on physical discs for one year and would ship you yours on request until 5 october 2012.

~ what got buried with it ~

My Phone did not die of neglect. It died because Windows Phone 7 shipped in late 2010 as a clean break, incompatible with Windows Mobile applications and uninterested in Windows Mobile users, and there was no path from one to the other for anybody's data. Windows Marketplace for Mobile went down in the same season for the same reason. Microsoft turned off its own previous decade and let the customers of it find their own way across.

Two years later, phone backup stopped being a product and became a checkbox in the setup wizard on both surviving platforms, free and switched on by default. The service that had to be explained at a keynote in 2009 was invisible plumbing by 2013. My Phone got the idea right early and belonged to the wrong operating system, which on Microsoft's mobile side is less a coincidence than the pattern.

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