It ended up being a bad call but at the time Android only had 2 years in the market and trusting the leading OS company to manufacture a proper mobile product wasn’t a crazy idea. Microsoft just completely mismanaged the whole phone thing and took down Nokia with it.
If I remember correctly the approach was so anti-google that you couldn’t even watch youtube on Windows Phones.
Microsoft also had a decent credibility with mobile device OS’s. They made OS’s for PDA’s like Windows CE, Windows Mobile, Pocket PC… those were all on some very capable devices.
God, I miss my Compaq Ipaq Pocket PC. That thing was a fucking beast.
Google sabotaged Windows Phone to protect Android. They refused to serve even standard Google web apps to the WP browser, instead relegating users to years-old mobile versions that looked and worked terribly. You could literally edit the user string on the Windows browser and get the modern, perfectly functional version. Then there was the constant YouTube fuckery where Google wouldn’t make a YouTube app for them, then wouldn’t let them make their own app either. The entire point was to starve the system to kill it in the cradle and on some level, it probably worked.
Looking at the fact that Google is under intense anticompetitive scrutiny now and has been egregiously destroying evidence every chance they get shows that this isn’t out of character for them.
It ended up being a bad call but at the time Android only had 2 years in the market and trusting the leading OS company to manufacture a proper mobile product wasn’t a crazy idea. Microsoft just completely mismanaged the whole phone thing and took down Nokia with it.
If I remember correctly the approach was so anti-google that you couldn’t even watch youtube on Windows Phones.
Microsoft also had a decent credibility with mobile device OS’s. They made OS’s for PDA’s like Windows CE, Windows Mobile, Pocket PC… those were all on some very capable devices.
God, I miss my Compaq Ipaq Pocket PC. That thing was a fucking beast.
Google sabotaged Windows Phone to protect Android. They refused to serve even standard Google web apps to the WP browser, instead relegating users to years-old mobile versions that looked and worked terribly. You could literally edit the user string on the Windows browser and get the modern, perfectly functional version. Then there was the constant YouTube fuckery where Google wouldn’t make a YouTube app for them, then wouldn’t let them make their own app either. The entire point was to starve the system to kill it in the cradle and on some level, it probably worked.
Looking at the fact that Google is under intense anticompetitive scrutiny now and has been egregiously destroying evidence every chance they get shows that this isn’t out of character for them.