Windows Phone

~ the obituary ~

windows phone 7 launched on 21 october 2010. it was microsoft's third attempt at a smartphone OS, after windows mobile (which was old and clunky) and windows mobile 6.5 (also clunky). windows phone 7 was a complete restart. new design language called metro. live tiles instead of icons. focused on social media integration and clean typography. it looked nothing like its predecessors.

the design was genuinely good. it was different from ios and android in interesting ways. the live tile concept (rectangular tiles on the home screen that updated with current information) was a real innovation. critics praised the OS. users who tried it often liked it.

windows phone was rare in turkey. turkcell carried the nokia lumia 920 in 2013 and i tried one in a shop. the tile interface was clean, the camera was supposedly excellent, but the app store felt empty next to android. nobody i knew bought one. by 2014 the few people who had (mostly nokia loyalists from the symbian era) had switched to android. the OS lasted a couple more years officially but nobody i knew touched it after that brief lumia shop demo.

nobody bought it. by 2013 windows phone had about 3.6 percent global market share at peak. by 2017 microsoft announced development was effectively over. by december 2019 even bug fixes had stopped. the platform is fully retired.

~ the case file ~

~ the live tile ~

windows phone's home screen was a grid of tiles. each tile represented an app. tiles came in three sizes. the distinctive feature was that tiles could be "live", showing rotating content from the underlying app. your weather tile showed the current temperature. your photos tile cycled through recent photos. your calendar tile showed your next meeting.

this was a different idea from ios's static icons or android's mix of icons and widgets. live tiles were halfway between an icon and a widget. the home screen was always doing something visible. you could glance at it and get a quick read of your day without opening any apps.

modern android home screens have widgets that fill a similar role. ios eventually got widgets in 2020. but the windows phone live tile, with its specific rectangular shape, color rules, and rotation behavior, was a coherent visual language that disappeared with the platform. nothing has felt quite like it since.

~ the nokia partnership ~

nokia and microsoft announced a partnership in february 2011. nokia would make windows phone the primary OS on its smartphones. nokia at the time was the world's largest phone maker by volume. microsoft's reasoning was that nokia's hardware would compensate for windows phone's small developer ecosystem. nokia's reasoning was that windows phone would compensate for nokia's failed symbian (see the symbian grave for that story).

the partnership was a slow disaster. nokia made some excellent windows phone hardware (lumia 920, 1020, 1520). the phones were beautifully built and had legitimately good cameras for the time. they did not sell at the volumes either company needed. by 2013 nokia's smartphone revenue had collapsed. microsoft bought the entire phone division in september 2013 for 7.2 billion dollars.

microsoft wrote off 7.6 billion of that purchase price in july 2015 and laid off most of the former nokia staff. the lumia brand kept going for another year or two but was effectively dead by 2016. the partnership had killed both companies' phone businesses without producing a successful platform.

~ the developer problem ~

the deeper problem was always developer support. apps mattered. ios had hundreds of thousands of apps by 2011. android was catching up fast. windows phone had a fraction of that, and the gap kept widening because developers preferred to ship on ios and android, where the user base was.

microsoft tried hard to fix this. they paid developers to port apps to windows phone. they shipped emulators. they offered direct integration with their tools. the strategy worked for big-name apps (instagram eventually shipped on windows phone, late and with fewer features). it did not work for the long tail. when you opened the windows phone store and searched for any niche app you actually used, it was almost certainly not there.

ballmer's famous "developers, developers, developers" rant from 2000 had been about why microsoft would always win in any platform war. windows phone was the platform that proved he was wrong. you could throw money at the problem and it still would not bring developers if the user base was not big enough to justify their time.

~ the end ~

satya nadella became microsoft's CEO in february 2014. he was much less committed to the phone business than ballmer had been. through 2015 and 2016 microsoft slowly wound down the lumia hardware and reduced investment in windows phone development. on 8 october 2017 they officially announced the platform was no longer being actively developed. existing devices kept getting security updates until december 2019.

microsoft pivoted its mobile strategy to making apps for ios and android. office, outlook, onedrive, microsoft authenticator, microsoft launcher, edge. these are all good apps. they ship on platforms microsoft does not own. that is the new microsoft mobile strategy and it is working much better than the old "ship our own platform" strategy.

~ what we lost ~

the third platform. ios and android became a duopoly partly because windows phone, blackberry, and webos all collapsed within a few years of each other. competition matters. there is now no third major mobile OS in the world. that is a loss for users, even if you have never used the alternatives.

the design language. metro / live tiles / typography-focused mobile design was a coherent aesthetic that produced beautiful first-party apps and reasonably nice third-party ones. that aesthetic is gone now. ios and android both look very different. nothing on the market now has the metro feel.

the nokia mobile industry. nokia at its peak was the largest phone manufacturer in the world. the windows phone partnership and microsoft's subsequent acquisition killed that business. the european mobile hardware industry, which had been a significant employer in finland, sweden, and the UK, mostly evaporated in the 2013-2018 window. nokia today is mainly a 5G network infrastructure company. the consumer phone business is gone.

@}-->--

              )
             (_)
            .-'-.
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
          __|   |__   .-.
       .-'  |   |  `-:   :
      :     `---'     :-'
       `-._       _.-'
           '""""""

« previous  ·  random  ·  next »