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Comment by Nursie | Hacker News Reader

I don't know why people would take the piss out of those fairly sensible investments, MS has been solid for decades, Apples rise has been unstoppable since the original iPod and ARM has been on the rise for decades too.

But your predictions for winphone are hopelessly optimistic, and MS has already lost the business sector for phones. They had a strong position a few years ago and threw it all away...

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They took the piss because I bought on a low when the companies were in deep doo. Apple just started shifting Firewire Mac-only iPods and the buggy POS that was OSX 10.1 which were laughed at initially, ARM was still suffering from Intel's pull-out of the DEC purchased StrongARM product and Acorn fiasco and Raytheon was pre-911 and had fucked up several major contracts. MS was in a good position (as always) but they were riding low.

MS's business sector proposition had a reasonable position in the market. The market was fragmented to bits then as well. A lot of it was Symbian and WinCE stuff with some fallout from proprietary platforms and the POS that was J2ME.

They let that go with WP7 and to iOS a bit (c'mon it's a version 1 product) but are clawing it back now with WP8.

Not one business person I know uses Android anymore though citing it's unreliable. I see a rough distribution of 70/30 iOS/WP8 and that's falling because dropping an iPhone is an expensive problem to sort for corporate IT departments and individual users. You can afford to throw away a couple of WP8 devices a year for the same cash per user as a 4S and 4 WP8 handsets for the price of a 5.

I've never seen a business person use a WP phone. Never. And I do get to talk to quite a lot of them. It's iOS most of the time with very few Androids. WP is simply not a factor. There are markets/territories where WP is doing quite well, especially in low income countries because you get them quite cheap. But when I say 'doing quite well', I mean: You actually get to see them in 1 out of 10 phones.

WP7 was not a version 1 product. It says 7 right there in the name. It was a big departure from what went before, certainly, but it's not like they were new to the mobile business, or to smartphones. The hype around WP7 was sickening, with many tech sites filled up with glowing reviews months before even dev previews of the device were launched. The same then happened with 8, with the same lacklustre excuses when it failed to get any market share (It's a new product! Give it time!).

I haven't seen a single person with a winphone that likes it. I know a couple who were suckered into it and hate it, and a few more who were persuaded to take a trial of a lumia for a week and took it back in a day.

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