Former Nokia engineer explains why Windows Phone failed

Many tech pundits termed Windows Phone as a colossal failure; some even hold the view that the demise of Windows Phone is the biggest failure of Microsoft. Some, including the former head of Windows and Windows Phone Terry Myerson, expressed their views on what went terribly wrong with Windows Phone so much so that Microsoft had to kill it.

A recent attempt has been made by a former Nokia engineer who claimed to have worked for Nokia both before and after the Microsoft acquisition. While the former Nokia employee is of the opinion that there were plenty of holdbacks that never allowed Windows Phone climb the ladder of success, the engineer mainly pointed out four reasons, which according to him, were key to Microsoft’s smartphone failure.

The former Nokia engineer said:

There are many well-known factors that caused WP’s demise, none of them alone took it down, but here are the ones that stood out most to me:

• Underestimating Google: Obviously, Apple was red hot and Microsoft knew that, but Google was new to the OS business and they really weren’t taken seriously enough. Android was pretty rough then, but the real value was Google’s services; when Google cut Microsoft off of YouTube, Maps, Gmail, etc, it really made WP look cheap.
• Botched Windows 8: Before Windows 8, WP had a lot of people’s curiosity. After Windows 8, people associated the two together has bad products even though the teams then were pretty independent and things done poorly on Windows 8 were not reflective of how the experience was on WP. Even with Windows 10, the stigma against “metro” never recovered.
• Microsoft’s reputation: At the time it was still horrible and it meant that the young guys who grew up hating Microsoft were making the big startups for other platforms.
• Loyalty: By 2014, people had themselves pretty comfortable with iOS or Android and even if WP got apps and whatever else it lacked, there just wasn’t a compelling reason to switch. Even now I sense the number swapping between iOS and Android is pretty low.

He also made an interesting revelation. According to him, coding for Windows Phone was always better than Android. “Android Studio was in its early days so we were still on Eclipse which was sorely lacking compared to Visual Studio. For all the negatives on the consumer side, coding for WP was always better than Android,” explained the former Nokia engineer.

Do our readers agree with what the former Nokia engineer said about the failure of Windows Phone? Do let us know in the comments section below.

Source: u/jollycode