Developers Ignored Windows For Android And iOS, Microsoft Forced To Follow

Along with the new Surface Book and the Surface Pro 4, Microsoft’s launch event this month also revealed the latest Lumia smartphones. The Lumia 950 and Lumia 950XL will be the first smartphones designed from the ground up to run Windows 10 in its ‘mobile’ mode. The two handsets will be packed with the latest software from Microsoft alongside the operating system, solid hardware specifications, and will clearly be the flagship devices from Redmond.

Microsoft Lumia 950 (image: Microsoft PR)

That’s not going to be enough to have any meaningful impact on the smartphone market share numbers, a fact that Microsoft surely knows. Redmond’s strategy has moved on from being a major OS provider in the mobile space, and if you want to know what went wrong look no further than the classic call of ‘developers, developers, developers’ and who followed who.

This theme goes back to the introduction of Windows Phone 7 as it took over from Windows Mobile. The important point here is that Microsoft implemented a compatibility break. Established applications on Windows Mobile had to be rewritten for Windows Phone… and coming from a standing start in terms of unit sales there was not a huge addressable market to finance any development efforts.

Less than two years later Microsoft did the same trick again as Windows Phone 8 arrived, and all of the Windows Phone 7 applications had to be re-engineered to run on the new NT-based kernel, as opposed to the CE-based kernel of 7. The Windows Phone platform was once again starting from zero units in the market, offering third-party developers very little opportunity to earn significant income.

In the background of Microsoft’s moves (and remember Nokia is dragged up in all of this, having dropped Symbian OS in favour of Windows Phone) you have the rise of Android and iOS, along with an explosion in third-party applications and opportunities to monetize applications to audiences that were magnitudes larger than Windows Phone could offer. Is it any wonder Windows Phone never picked up any traction from developers?

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