Replace "new phone line" with pretty much anything 'positive' and it fits Microsoft.

Better OS? Nope! Shit management. Better productivity software? Nope! Shit management. Better cloud and virtualization platform? Nope! Shit management.

The first day I used Windows 8 RC, I was flabbergasted that anyone approved that dumpster fire for release. They've been trying to unfuck that ever since, and at dead snail's pace. Thanks, shit management! You're why I left systems administration to be a bad programmer!

For real. AOSP is open source, and Google is taking more things private. MS could start driving AOSP since FOSS projects go where the group contributing the most wants it to go.

It's not that easy on the hardware side. Keep in mind that the way both Google and Microsoft previously entered this market was by buying an established manufacturer (Motorola and Nokia, respectively). But Microsoft squandered Nokia's manufacturing assets and would need to either start from scratch or acquire somebody else. But there aren't many manufacturers left that are decent, non-Chinese, and willing to sell.

There's also the option to pair with a manufacturer and ask them to put Microsoft's OS on their phones, but Google would most likely lean on anybody attempting that and threaten to revoke their access to Android trademark and Google Services. Samsung is the only manufacturer in a position to tell them to suck it but they're locked into a complex struggle with Google and it's anybody's guess if taking Microsoft on board would help or hinder their position.

They literally couldn’t pay the devs. Netflix for instance flat out refused to have blackberry pay for 2 full time devs to maintain an app.

Netflix looked at the market share and determined that there was 0 benefit. The people that were on blackberry devices already had a Netflix account.

Additionally Blackberry store apps were compelling for devs. Dev feedback included ease of development and more importantly they made a lot more money on the blackberry store than on iOS/android, both because the cut was better and they could jack the prices up because the customers were not nearly as frugal.

To get into mobile would require a massive overhaul of windows apps to get them mobile-friendly

Oh look, that’s exactly what they did and now we have PWAs for lots of apps. Maybe MS is getting ready to take a stab at mobile again.

Actually, the main cause it failed was because Microsoft bullied the manufacturers until they said enough and bailed out. So they were forced to buy a manufacturer to keep going (Nokia) then gave up halfway through after buying it.

Microsoft has stupid amounts of cash and could have kept Windows Phone going indefinitely, even at a loss. It's how they broke into the console market, by keeping the Xbox going at a loss for a decade.

Yeah the lack of apps would have been a problem initially but everybody would have relented given enough time, and in the meantime most of the missing services could have been accessed in a browser.

They couldn’t even be bothered developing their own apps for it. The mail app began to lag behind Outlook on Android, Minecraft was never ported to it when it could have been a killer exclusive app.

Maemo and Meego were so good

I remember it being good hardware and the OS was actually really good. It felt very fast when a lot of Android phones still felt sluggish. What they really screwed up was the third party apps. Nobody was making anything for it and they didn’t give developers a reason to. It was a product that should have succeeded if not for bad management.

My brother had one and loved it! But outside of basic tasks he couldn't do anything with it. Eventually he switched to Android just to have apps.

Xamarin was supposed to solve this. They even bought the fucking company.

Part of their issue is their desktop and x86 legacy apps ecosystem was no use on ARM touch devices.

But more competition than 2 would have been nice. We need stuff to move back to mobile web apps instead of apps. Then it's platform independence and the sandbox is interchangable.

I don't even care about other features. The tiling home screen of the OS was really nice to use and when used properly by the apps could result in a "live" OS unlike the iconographic interfaces of iOS and Android. The homescreen was also old-age friendly and really a pleasure to use.

The OS ram like really smooth on 512mb RAM, unlike their counterpart android phones which were struggling back then with 2-3GB RAM.

The lumias themselves had a ton of useful features like tap to wake etc, which didn't consume much battery and in general the Nokia cameras were top notch for the time.

Basically, the OS got killed because of a chicken and egg problem with the apps, and the OS being from Microsoft, got a death knell because of the reputation. Also for some fucking reason, Microsoft decided that the already low userbase WP7s were to be depreciated rather than provide an upgrade path fo WP8 and WP10.

Microsoft didn't even provide a proper upgrade path for it's users. WP7 couldn't go to 8 and same for Windows Mobile 10.

Same, a Nokia Lumia 710. Lack of app support is what killed them. Even mainstream apps you had to have a third party version, Facebook, Insta, etc.

The windows phone was not out for very long. It is unknown if it would have succeed, but at the time Android was an also ran as well, and non-smart phones still dominated. Blackberry was still a major player to beat at the time. Windows if they stuck with it might have done reasonably well. It would never have become a monopoly, but we cannot know how well it would have done.

Honestly I would rather see a large company like Microsoft build their own OS from the ground up. Without play services you wouldn't be able to use a lot of play store apps even if you installed the apk file. I think Google provides a lot of baked in services to developers to lock their apps into the google ecosystem. Microsoft wouldn't really add anything of value to android in my opinion, we already have one big company looking over our shoulder, I don't think we need a second. I think the Amazon Fire phone proves that even with a lot of money to burn it's hard to break into google's market.

Microsoft making their own platform that is not UNIX-like would probably get a lot more interest than just modifying android.

Google actively blocked a ton of their stuff from being accessed from windows phones. They even deprecated some communication protocols in gmail to ensure some features of Microsoft's mail app would not work with Gmail (and then Microsoft found a way to make it work with an alternative protocol and Google went ahead and dropped that too).

YouTube could only be used in internet Explorer. Google refused to let Microsoft make a client for it or do one themselves. Some folks created third party clients for it but Google was quick to block them too.

Then Pokémon Go came out for iOS and Android and it was the nail on the coffin.

Edit: I forgot to mention Instagram, it was a big part of it too. I think this was before Facebook acquired them, because Facebook (and Twitter) were VERY well integrated into Microsoft apps on top of having their own apps available.

In general windows phone was the easiest platform to make apps for (I made a few), but there was a lot of sabotage from those big names. I was very conflicted because in one hand, Microsoft was tasting a bit of their own venom - as they had done the same sort of stuff so many times before, but in the other hand windows phone really felt like the best mobile OS and I wanted it to stay relevant.