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Windows 10 Mobile Windows Phone 8.1

Microsoft has finally best-selling for skillful what the rest of us have known for some time. Windows 10 Mobile has bought the farm, kicked the bucket, left the building, and passed on. Said in that particular lodge, it makes it sound every bit if the OS is perhaps enjoying a well-deserved retirement after some years delivering rural mail to an e'er-shrinking customer base.

In corporate speak, of course, things are not and then expressive. In a recent series of Tweets, Joe Belfiore, Microsoft's Corporate Vice President for Windows, confirmed Windows 10 Mobile is dead. While the company volition continue to offering bug fixes and corporate support for pre-existing accounts, there volition exist no new characteristic updates or rollouts.

https://twitter.com/joebelfiore/status/917071399541391360

Windows ten Mobile's fans, of which there are at least several, argued this was evidence that Microsoft had variously dropped the ball at points in the Windows 10 Mobile rollout, which is both truthful and faux. On the one hand, CEO Satya Nadella made it clear he didn't accept much use for mobile when he took over the visitor from Steve Ballmer. On the other, Windows Phone was already on life back up when Nadella got the job. Claiming that Microsoft should've connected pumping out hardware in perpetuity ignores how Windows Phone and Windows Mobile had peaked at some point prior to when Nadella got the job and began declining thereafter. There was no point at which Nadella could argue he was even seeing the hint of a turn-around.

Companies with product lines in steady decline may still invest in their ecosystems if the existing user base is big or rich enough. But fifty-fifty this strategy has its limits. Microsoft could afford to go along investing in Windows ten Mobile, just what would be the betoken if customers weren't moving to the platform? Microsoft might accept had a ghost of a adventure of expanding its market share if Windows 10 Mobile had been characteristic-complete on the same solar day Windows 10 launched, simply it wasn't. Then Redmond spent a yr more often than not destroying its own reputation by trying to cajole, trick, and forcefulness people into upgrading from Windows 7 or Windows 8 on to Windows ten on the desktop. I'thousand not saying this was the reason Windows 10 Mobile didn't succeed, only I'm sure it didn't help.

The biggest single trouble with Windows 10 Mobile was that the unified Windows session information and portability it offered arrived five years too late. If Windows Telephone vii had been built with lightweight versions of Continuum or "Option Up Where I Left Off," Redmond might've been able to stave off iOS or Android altogether. Plenty of people didn't accept smartphones withal in 2022 or 2022, which means they weren't really locked into a new ecosystem. A flawless Windows integration would've been appealing to many customers. The problem, of form, was that Microsoft had no real provision for that kind of switch. Previous iterations of its mobile operating systems had used Windows CE, which had a very dissimilar codebase than the and then-current Windows 7.

At that place are other things Microsoft could've tried to do differently, like supporting more devices with upgrades from Windows Telephone 7 to Windows Telephone 8, but I'1000 not sure how much they would've mattered. The large-motion picture features that would've given Microsoft a existent use-instance against upstarts similar iOS and Android required a level of integration mobile devices of the solar day might not have been able to handle, no matter how lightweight the company tried to brand them. By the time the hardware and software stack were both ready, the majority of mobile customers weren't looking for a new operating system. Begetting the unabridged cost of designing and bringing a high-end production to market was never going to be attractive to Nadella, not without some concrete sign that a marketplace existed for it. That sign never appeared.

Information technology's difficult to blame Microsoft for non being willing to continue to chase a market that wasn't interested in what it was selling. Windows Phone and Windows 10 Mobile were better operating systems than they got credit for being, just they weren't in the right place at the right time. There will be no Surface Phone riding over the horizon with the calvary.