.NET took an unexpected turn towards cross-platform FOSS
A third major player in the smartphone market may have abated the enshittificatory forces for a bit longer
Having a platform that’s consumer-oriented, in contrast to their mostly business-oriented offerings today, might have clued them in to consumer sentiment a little better
Having a viable path towards profitability outside of enterprise services might have made the all-in gamble on OpenAI less appealing
I think you’re on to something here honestly. Windows Phone was Microsoft’s last big new bet in the consumer market (you could argue Game Pass here, but the scope is more niche than a general compute platform), and I am sure that if it succeeded there would’ve been a significant cultural shift at Microsoft, similar to how the success (and subsequent revenue stream dominance) of iPhone/iOS did at Apple.
Sadly, we don’t live in that reality, so now everything Microsoft makes (again, with exception of the aforementioned and dreadfully mismanaged Xbox/Game Pass efforts) for consumers needs to have some kind of enterprise revenue angle to get greenlit at all. From experience I can tell you that a large number of great product ideas wither on the vine at Microsoft simply because management doesn’t consider anything that won’t move the needle on enterprise revenue.
You might just be the most optimistic person… ever… lol Reading this is like watching TNG, and seeing a version of the future that could be, but never will be.
Can you imagine how bad Windows phone would be today if it had survived? Co-pilot infested shit.
They were amazing in their day though.
At least there would be some competition against Google and Apple.
Hard to say, actually.
I think you’re on to something here honestly. Windows Phone was Microsoft’s last big new bet in the consumer market (you could argue Game Pass here, but the scope is more niche than a general compute platform), and I am sure that if it succeeded there would’ve been a significant cultural shift at Microsoft, similar to how the success (and subsequent revenue stream dominance) of iPhone/iOS did at Apple.
Sadly, we don’t live in that reality, so now everything Microsoft makes (again, with exception of the aforementioned and dreadfully mismanaged Xbox/Game Pass efforts) for consumers needs to have some kind of enterprise revenue angle to get greenlit at all. From experience I can tell you that a large number of great product ideas wither on the vine at Microsoft simply because management doesn’t consider anything that won’t move the needle on enterprise revenue.
Now I’m even more bummed out it didn’t survive. Still a good thought experiment.
You might just be the most optimistic person… ever… lol Reading this is like watching TNG, and seeing a version of the future that could be, but never will be.
Honestly, I was only interested in the hardware. Nokia made most of the phones that ran Windows phone and they made bricks.
Only good thing about them. Apps were all functionally the same and always half broken, all the time. But the phones looked pretty cool.