This article comes from cooperative media Lei Feng , Reprinted with permission from INSIDE
Of course, we will continue to support this platform, such as bug fixes, security updates, etc. But we will no longer focus on adding new features.
Windows Phone is dead
The person who said the above sentence was Joe Belfiore, the vice president of Microsoft who was once in charge of Windows Phone. On October 9th, when a netizen asked Microsoft’s mobile operating system Windows Phone (now officially called Windows 10 Mobile) on Twitter, Joe Belfiore gave this answer. Although this answer is not surprising, it is almost equivalent to Microsoft’s official announcement of the death of Windows Phone.
The foreign media’s evaluation of Joe Belfiore’s sentence is that he nailed the last nail in the cover of the Windows Phone coffin.
In addition to the above words, Joe Belfiore also posted a message on Twitter stating that Microsoft has put in a lot of effort for Windows Phone, spent a lot of money, wrote a lot of software, but the number of users of Windows Phone is so small that most Companies are not willing to invest in it.
Joe Belfiore’s “too few users” is indeed true. According to the 2017 Q1 smart phone market report released by the market research organization IDC, Windows Phone has only a 0.1% market share globally. In the previous forecast in 2016, IDC had thought that the share of Windows Phone would drop to 0.1% in 2020; unexpectedly, Microsoft had reached this tragic state 3 years in advance.
Considering that several months have passed since IDC’s report, perhaps the current market share of Windows Phone is less than 0.1%.
In fact, the mobile phone currently used by Joe Belfiore is the Samsung Galaxy S8 with Microsoft software, and Microsoft founder Bill Gates also said in an interview at the end of September that he had switched to Google’s Android system.
Undoubtedly, Windows Phone is dead.
Short 6-year career
Although Microsoft announced the launch of the Windows Phone system in October 2010, it was actually born through the Lumia 800, the first Windows Phone mobile phone launched by Nokia in October 2011. Therefore, from the perspective of time before and after, Windows Phone has only experienced 6 years of life from life to death.
In almost six years, the development of Windows Phone itself has indeed experienced a lot of turbulence and twists and turns. This is another long story. However, from the perspective of the entire mobile operating system market, Windows Phone has always been a marginalized role.
The following two pictures are also a set of data from IDC, which respectively record the golden period of rapid development of smart phones and the changes in the market share of various mainstream smart phone operating systems in the past two years.
From these two pictures, we can see the following points:
Only Android and iOS have a market share greater than 10%, and the others are below 10%;
- The development curves of Android and iOS show a symmetrical state one after another, with one party falling in share and the other rising at the same time. This also illustrates the joint dominance of Android and iOS on the entire mobile operating system ecosystem.
- The market share of Windows Phone has almost always hovered below 5%. Until the second quarter of 2015, the market share of Windows Phone seemed quite stable, with no obvious signs of decline. However, starting from the third quarter of 2015, the market share of Windows Phone has continued to decline, and to this day, it has almost approached zero.
For Microsoft and Windows Phone, this is undoubtedly a sad story. The sad part of this story is not because the opponent is too strong to surpass, but because I have never had the opportunity to truly stand on the competitive arena of the mobile operating system.
From start to finish, there were only two players on that stage, iOS and Android; third-party niche operating systems, including Firefox OS, Web OS, Ubuntu Touch, etc., served as foils.
Yes, even Windows Phone, backed by the giant Microsoft’s father, is no exception.
Microsoft’s two major failures
In fact, for a long time since its inception, Windows Phone was considered the third largest mobile operating system capable of challenging the dominance of Android and iOS; especially under the dual blessings of software giant Microsoft and hardware giant Nokia , The aura of Windows Phone is not dazzling.
However, the fact is that Windows Phone did not seize the opportunity to enter the mainstream mobile operating system during the period of the rapid growth of the smartphone market. It can only watch Android and iOS you come and go from 10% away, but it can do nothing.
It is undeniable that one of the most important reasons why Windows Phone cannot compete with Android and iOS is the lack of application ecology. However, the key obstacles encountered in the development of Windows Phone were caused by Microsoft’s own mistakes.
Microsoft’s first major mistake was the break in model support between Windows Phone 7 and Windows Phone 8.
In June 2012, when Microsoft released Windows Phone 8, it was announced that all phones equipped with Windows Phone 7 system could not be upgraded to Windows Phone 8 due to the replacement of the kernel. This is a fatal blow to Windows Phone 7, which has just started a few months ago. At that time, Nokia’s Lumia 800 and Lumia 900 and other Windows Phone 7 phones had just been released not long after Microsoft’s move was tantamount to announcing their death sentences.
In sharp contrast, each generation of iOS can support the iPhone released three years ago.
The acquisition of Nokia’s mobile phone business can be said to be Microsoft’s biggest failure in the development of Windows Phone.
In September 2013, Microsoft included Nokia’s mobile phone business at a price of US$7.2 billion. The purpose was to use Nokia’s hardware advantages to support the development of Windows Phone. This is also the last legacy left by former CEO Ballmer to Microsoft before leaving office.
However, after Nadella took over as Microsoft CEO in February 2014, he began the process of going to Nokia. In July 2014, Microsoft announced layoffs of 18,000 employees, 70% of which were former Nokia employees. In October, Microsoft confirmed that it would no longer use Nokia as the brand name of Windows Phone phones and changed it to “Microsoft Lumia”.
In June 2015, former Nokia CEO Elop, who was responsible for Microsoft hardware and Lumia mobile phones, left Microsoft; in July, Nadella issued a statement that Microsoft plans to lay off 7,800 employees and write down business assets related to Nokia devices and services About 7.6 billion US dollars, this figure even exceeds the full value of the original Microsoft Nokia related business.
It can be said that the acquisition of Nokia completely lost the opportunity for Windows Phone to rise. On the one hand, Microsoft is in financial trouble and has to make up for it through various layoff plans and business adjustments; on the other hand, almost only Lumia remains in the Windows Phone camp, and previous partners such as Samsung, HTC, and Huawei have not launched Windows again. Phone model.
When Elop left Microsoft in 2015, the latest model in the Windows Phone camp was just the Lumia 640/XL with Qualcomm Snapdragon 400 processor and 1G memory.
The lingering life of Windows Phone
In July 2015, Microsoft released the Windows 10 operating system; at the same time, Windows Phone also entered the Windows 10 Mobile era.
Originally in Microsoft’s plan, Windows 10 and Windows 10 Mobile are an integral symbiosis relationship. Microsoft hopes to encourage developers to develop applications for the Windows 10 desktop version, and then share the applications with Windows 10 Mobile. This plan seemed ingenious, but quite difficult, and it proved to be bankrupt in the later development process.
In October 2015, Microsoft released Lumia 950/XL; judging from the time allocation of the conference, the weight of these two phones in many Microsoft products has been significantly weakened. The biggest selling point of Lumia 950/XL has become its ability to transform into a desktop computer through the Continuum function.
Under the call of Windows 10 Mobile, quite a few manufacturers have joined the Windows Phone camp, such as Hewlett-Packard, VAIO, Acer and other manufacturers. But they still cannot prevent Windows Phone’s market share from falling below 1% in March 2016.
At the Microsoft Build 2016 conference held in April 2016, the Windows 10 desktop operating system became the only protagonist. No one mentioned the development and future plans of Microsoft Windows Phone, and no one gave out a Windows Phone in the speech. Cell phone. When partners such as BMW and Starbucks took the stage to demonstrate, they also used iOS devices.
What is even more frustrating is that by 2016, Microsoft simply stopped updating the Lumia product line and sold its mobile phone hardware business to Foxconn in May 2016. After that, Microsoft successively stopped Lumia’s updates on various social networks.
However, at the software level, Microsoft has not completely given up on Windows Phone support; not only that, Microsoft’s partner HP has also launched Windows Phone models such as Elite X3. But this is more like a backlash for the defeat of Windows Phone, because products such as Elite X3 are geared towards the enterprise market and are no longer able to reach the ordinary consumer market.
Therefore, when Windows Phone is already like water without a source and a tree without roots, its market share is rapidly approaching zero, and it seems to be smooth.
Metabolism, eternal
When Microsoft’s new CEO Satya Nadella took office in 2014, he once changed Microsoft’s slogan to “action first, cloud first”; however, two years later, Nadella gave up this slogan. Take “Intelligent Cloud & Intelligent Edge” as Microsoft’s new strategy. Obviously, from the perspective of this new strategy, “action first” has been abandoned by Microsoft’s strategy; in this case, the death of Windows Phone is inevitable.
It can be said that the passing of Windows Phone marks the end of the previous chapter of the development of the mobile Internet market at the operating system level. Google and Apple have become winners with Andorid and iOS respectively. Although Microsoft’s sad exit seems a bit sad, it also conforms to the historical development process; we don’t need to regret Windows Phone.
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