In an interview with Business Insider, Satya Nadella, the current boss of Microsoft, talks about the tragically aborted destiny of Windows Phone.
In an era that now seems largely bygone, the mobile market was divided into three major ecosystems: iOS, Android and Windows Phone. Before Microsoft bet everything on artificial intelligence and video games, the company had also tried to establish itself against the behemoths Apple and Google, but without much success. After several years of very relative success, the company abandoned its OS, to the great dismay of the current boss, it would seem.
Reinventing the mobile world
“One of the hardest decisions I made when I became CEO was our exit from what I will call the mobile phone world as it was defined at the time», admits Satya Nadella in an interview with Business Insider. Remember, it was in 2017, an eternity and a half ago in the digital world, Microsoft ended its support for Windows Phone after years of battling against Apple and Google. Microsoft’s page in the mobile world was definitely turning, leaving only Android and iOS to reign supreme.
“In retrospect, I think we could have made this work by reinventing the computing category between PCs, tablets and phones», Explains the CEO of Microsoft. Strangely, this is exactly what Microsoft tried to do, unsuccessfully, during the Windows Phone years. The Redmond giant’s OS has always wanted to bridge the gap between phone and computer, Microsoft even going so far as to stick a mobile interface to Windows 8 in the hope of seeing a great movement of unification between all mobile devices.
Windows 10 Mobile took this logic even further with Continuum, a tool supposed to allow a phone to transform into a real desktop OS once connected to a screen. But, like all the manufacturers who have tried their hand at this little game, Microsoft has failed.
A revival for Microsoft
Even if Nadella regrets leaving the mobile world today, at the time it seemed like the best solution. Even with all the money in the world, golden bridges offered to developers to port their applications to its OS and a solid partnership with Nokia, Microsoft has never managed to capture public interest in its OS.
This is not the first time that Microsoft officials have expressed regret over the company’s inability to establish itself in the mobile world. Steve Ballmer, the former CEO, explained that he had not seen the shift towards mobile, too busy taking care of Windows Vista, and that it was one of the failures “that he regretted the most“. Even Bill Gates admitted that “his biggest mistake» is not to have got ahead of Android.
It’s a safe bet that this mobile trauma has forced Microsoft to be more attentive to transformations in the sector, pushing the company to become a major player in the current race for the development of artificial intelligence. So a failure can also have good sides.
Source: Business Insider
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