Clearly, the Windows Phone pill does not pass muster at Microsoft. The group’s CEO, Satya Nadella, has just admitted that Microsoft’s exit from mobile telephony was poorly done and that it was a strategic error for his group not to continue the mobile activity.
“The decision that a lot of people talk about – and one of the hardest I made when I became CEO – was our exit from what I’ll call mobile as it was defined at the time. In retrospect, I think we could have made this work by reinventing the computing category between PCs, tablets and phones“, he said in an interview with Business Insider.
Satya Nadella took over from former CEO Steve Ballmer in 2014 and, just over a year later, drew a line under Microsoft’s $7.6 billion acquisition of Nokia’s phone business. Microsoft finally confirmed that Windows Phone was indeed dead in 2017.
And it really took until 2019 for Microsoft to really pull the plug on Windows Phone, inviting its users to switch to the competition.
When Satya Nadella talks about reinventing the IT category between PCs, tablets and phones, should we see a call towards the Surface Duo? Microsoft actually launched its Surface Duo handsets in 2019 then two years later its Surface Duo 2 running Android. But with no successor in sight and the absence of software updates, the future of the Surface Duo is not clear to everyone.
Bill Gates categorical on the fate of Windows Phone
Satya Nadella is not the first at Microsoft to express such regret. Bill Gates said in 2019 that Windows Phone could have beaten Android.
The co-founder of Microsoft then explained that if he had not been monopolized by the antitrust investigation targeting his firm at the time and if he had been able to deliver Motorola, requesting an OS, on time, then Windows Mobile ( then Windows Phone) would be on all our phones. Google acquired Android in 2005 for $50 million, and its former CEO Eric Schmidt admitted in 2012 that Google’s initial goal was to counter Microsoft’s early efforts in mobile.
Former Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer also regretted not being more proactive about the threat from Android and the iPhone, focusing the company’s efforts on Windows Mobile while mocking the iPhone, which he described as “most expensive phone in the world and which does not attract professional customers because it does not have a keyboard“.
Microsoft is now focusing on apps for Android and iOS. The company is constantly updating its Phone Link app to link Android and even iPhone phones to Windows, and Microsoft has a close relationship with Samsung to ensure its mobile Office apps come pre-installed on Samsung’s Android phones.
Sources: The Verge