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Comment by wdn | Hacker News Reader

Microsoft got a chance to steal market shares and established themselves as an alternative to iOS and Android when they introduced Lumia 950 and 950XL. I really think the device were great. However, they made the fatal mistake on this, the price point.

They priced the 950/950XL same as iPhone and Android flagship phones. Yes, I do understand the 950 and 950 XL have flagship hardware, however, you do not priced it as your phone is in high demand.

If they priced the phones at 300, it would sell a lot more. Developers do not want to develop for an OS with no users.

Not only the hardware price was bad. The fees to developer was also bad. If I recalled correctly, they also want to takes the same amount of fee as Apple and Google. If I was Microsoft, I would not charge developer any fees for 3 years just to get them on board.

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> Microsoft got a chance to steal market shares and established themselves as an alternative to iOS and Android when they introduced Lumia 950 and 950XL.

The hardware was never the problem. Lots of great devices shipped with Windows Phone.

(Disclosure: Microsoft employee)

At some point I looked for Windows Phone device with a decent audio output so I could enjoy my lossless paid subscription to services like Tidal.

I wasn't able to select a Windows Phone. There were several models but none of it made an explicit accent on sound quality. As a last resort I looked to external DACs and it turned out that Windows Phone didn't support them either.

I just went and bought a second hand iPhone 6 with a good discount. The sound quality I got from it was decent and I became a happy Apple customer one more time (had iPhone 4 and other Apple gears before).

So a statement that the hardware was never the problem is a bit of a stretch. Everything accumulates pretty quickly and every detail has an impact.

The set of people interested in running external DACs for their phones is vanishingly small. I’m pretty sure that losing that market wasn’t what doomed Windows Phone.

Regardless, my point wasn’t that the hardware was perfect for everyone or every use case. The point was that there were premium Windows Phone devices before the 950 showed up. The 950 arrived after the end state for Windows Phone was pretty obvious.

> The set of people interested in running external DACs for their phones is vanishingly small.

The point is that everybody is a different niche. If you start this attitude that feature X is uncommon and not worth the effort, then you do that for a thousand feature X's, eventually you make a product for no one and since you can't predict what niche feature X will suddenly become more important later, the future doesn't happen on your platform.

I have talked to far too many people at MS who have exactly this dismissive attitude about every single feature.

The “features” missing from Windows Phone were mostly high quality 3rd party apps. Windows Phone had a ton of great features in itself.

As a dev (at Microsoft), I’m well aware of the potential risk of dismissing features. However, I’m also aware that features are not free. Everyone who actually ships has to make tradeoffs. You can’t ship every feature so you have to cut ones that you think are low value (to the customer or the business, depending on how you look at it).

I spent time at MS too, and I have worked on a WP app, and I don't think my comment has been grokked here. It was the app platform I was thinking of the most that was missing lots of features, and I would say the whole approach to how the app platform people exposed device capabilities was both wrongheaded and not at parity with what the other guys did. And instead of being aware of this gap and taking corrective action, they doubled down into Raymond Chen style "every feature starts at minus 100 points", which works well if you have a desktop monopoly but not as well in a truly competitive market, and meanwhile can be used to justify a lot of bad behavior.

I don't think the whole answer fits in a comment box though. If you have interest in learning more offline I can explain it further.

I didn’t build anything for Windows Phone (or any phone) so I don’t have much experience with the platform’s SDK weaknesses. I mostly heard that programming for it was pretty nice but that it just wasn’t worth it because of the user base. That’s just my anecdote though.

Not for WP10, specifically.

Continuum was to be the killer feature but they shot themselves in the foot by releasing the Lumia 650 with such mediocre specs that didn't support it.

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