Years ago when I thought of Google I thought of their search engine. Then I thought about them in terms of their successful software like Google Maps, Docs, Chrome, etc. Then I started to become more aware of what they were up to and thought of them in terms of their new motto, "Be Evil". Now I mainly think about Google in terms of a company that kills products and initiatives. I can't think of a single other company that has less of an ability to follow through than Google. Their newer motto should be "When the going gets tough, quit."
Microsoft is rapidly approaching "When the going gets tough, quit" territory. Windows Mobile was a vastly superior operating system, but it was dropped because it was only in third place. Android is still catching up to it's feature set. They've just more or less abandoned Cortana, relegating it to Office and an integration for other voice assistants. Edge, which while buggy beat Chrome on power consumption and performance more often than not, has been dropped for a reskin of Chrome.
Which is to say, Microsoft no longer appears to want to compete with anyone in any market where there is a leading competitor that isn't them.
>Windows Mobile was a vastly superior operating system, but it was dropped because it was only in third place
Putting aside the claim that Windows Phone was a superior operating system...Windows Phone PEAKED at 3% of market, that was prior to spending $7 billion on Nokia in a desperate attempt to keep going. They dropped to 0.1% of the market at the beginning of the 2017 when they terminated it. It's ludicrous to suggest they could rebound from that. As for superior OS, they shipped Windows Phone 7 in 2010 without the ability to cut and paste text.
A new operating system has 0% of the market. Which is to say, I would argue that building for the long haul is almost always preferable to abandoning ship. And now that we are realizing how badly we need a real alternative, it's gone.
I wouldn't say it had fallen to 0.1% of the market on it's own, Microsoft literally just stopped investing in it for years before it was officially killed. There's dozens of unreleased prototypes and for a while Microsoft just didn't provide ANY hardware options. Much like the death of the keyboard slider form factor on Android, the lack of sales came from consumers having no options to buy than not wanting the product.
Your attempt to criticize Windows Mobile by referring to it's state in 2010, not 2019, mostly renders it an irrelevant argument. (Though Microsoft has regularly launched things too little, too late, I would agree.) Windows 10 Mobile is still superior today to the latest release of Android, and receives security updates faster and more regularly. The next version of Android is planning to introduce features Windows Mobile has supported since launch.
MSFT spent $7.2 billion dollars on Nokia in 2014 to try to increase their market share, which failed.
>Much like the death of the keyboard slider form factor on Android, the lack of sales came from consumers having no options to buy than not wanting the product.
I think it is very safe to say that no one wanted a Windows Phone, despite the backing of MSFT and tens of billions of dollars spent.
Microsoft spent that money to stop the bleeding that their last non-corporate OEM (HP being the only other OEM making devices, and those only targeted to big enterprise) was likely to either go bankrupt or switch to Android because of the race to the bottom of cheap Android (and Android knock-off) hardware changing the phone market. Microsoft buying Nokia was a much a symptom of the problem as an attempt to correct it.
The platform didn't fail for lack of fans or for lack of merits, it failed as much because hardware is a tricksy game and Android played that game better and didn't anger the US Telecoms while doing it. (Microsoft had the US Telecoms actively avoiding trying to sell Windows phones, which certainly didn't help.)
I would argue there were vastly more Windows Mobile users than Google Reader users, more than likely (in some countries, WinMo had a 10% or greater market share for a while), and I would love to keep using my Windows phone, but I'm going to leave it behind when security updates end this December.
