You don't know how untrue this is, couple of things. First lets start with this qoute

"According to Kantar's October 2013 report, Windows Phone accounted for 10.2% of all smartphone sales in Europe and 4.8% of all sales in the United States."

and then this one

"Microsoft announced new data from IDC indicating that Windows Phone is the second-most-used mobile platform in Latin America."

Lastly, do you not remember the launch of the iPhone? Not only was it only available in the US, you could only get it on AT&T.

There can be many reasons Windows Phone failed, but what you've mentioned isn't one of them.

But you're not competing with the iPhone of ten years ago. You're competing with the iPhone of today. It's difficult but in the end just excuses.

Windows phones were never a serious competitor. It just wasn't that important to the life and death of Microsoft and the result, from a business organizational perspective, is very much expected.

Consider that his perception might explain why those numbers are so awful. It's perfectly possible for the phones to be accessible to those kind of numbers of users and still be totally unavailable in the outlets a huge proportion of potential customers would look for them.

E.g. I live in the UK, and I can't remember ever having seen a Windows phone in the stores. I'm sure they're available, because I've seen people use them now and again. But if they were available in the stores I've been in, they were hidden away.

You seem to be implying they were much more readily available in the United States, which seems like a stretch.

I didn't imply anything about actual availability at all, but about how perceived availability matters.

To restate my point more clearly, the situation was much the same in the US.

yeah iphone was launched in 2007. We are in 2017 and if you want to take marketshare from your competitors then you need to be releasing your products in all major markets. Not a couple of them.

Windows phone was quite popular in Asia yet it died due to lack of devices.

My mum still rocks an HTC HD7 tho.

I remember the HD7, I was eyeing it off for a while, I could buy one, I just couldn't find a phone store near me that would let me try one. I moved to Android and the HTC Desire HD.

I had been a Windows Mobile 6.1 user.

I really would like to know why they abandoned Windows Mobile / CE at that time. It was quite strong foundation. Metro could be built on top of it easily.

Mystery.

You're being very disingenuous with the numbers. That 10% marketshare, in a few European countries, was mostly composed of cheap subsidized phones. That business model was not sustainable and subsequently collapsed.

Didn't the iPhone launch US-only?

It doesn’t matter. Subsequent iPhones are launched globally.

Microsoft does not launch subsequent products globally.

The surface takes many many months to reach many parts of Asia. Surface studio is only in a hand full of countries. Surface laptop is only in a handful of countries. Surface book is almost non existent.

The only thing Microsoft makes that it launches well is the Xbox.

Even that is not true - Xbox One didn't launch in a whole bunch of territories, including half of EU! If you lived in say, Poland, and wanted a next-gen console, PS4 was the only choice since X1 wasn't even available at all for few months after launch. Hell, Xbox Live didn't support 90% of the world until very recently, once again, if you lived in Poland, Czech Republic, Greece, you could kiss Xbox Live goodbye unless you had a way to purchase foreign top-up cards. Sony never had this problem, their products launch globally and work globally.

Edit: to add insult to the injury, Microsoft teams seem to think that literally no one ever speaks a language outside of its original country. Until literally 2-3 updates ago(so for 4 years after launch) you couldn't set the language on your Xbox One to a different one than your Region, which of course would prevent you from accessing the store correctly. Live in UK but want to have the console in German? Tough luck, you better set your region to Germany, there was no other way. It's just gross incompetence.

I am going to leave this here:

http://www.businessinsider.com/red-ring-of-death-recall-2016...

> It doesn’t matter.

Yeah, I remember this argument. It depends on whether it benefits Apple or not. For example, when Apple moved off of Google for it's mapping, people were saying that this was just the first iteration, the first version of Maps, when it clearly wasn't, and that the fact that it lost features and information that were there before, people were okay with it because it was Apple's first map software (when it really wasn't).

I just find it interesting the way this argument is used for and against Apple.

It's not hard to see why Apple launching one iPhone in America only, a full decade ago, doesn't matter when the next nine iPhones came out everywhere.

Sure, but why tell me?

Because you are the one making nonsense arguments.

My argument? I wasn't making an argument about the iPhone, merely commenting on the hypocrisy of those making these claims and how they were used before to bolster Apple.

You can't hold both to be true at the same time. Either Apple was wrong with it's Maps release, or Microsoft was fine when not competing. You can't say Apple was right and Microsoft was wrong. It's illogical.

And other people also said that it has to be as good as google maps now. And it has gotten better. Still not google maps good.

You don't need to be better than your competitors on every axis. You need to be good enough on every axis, and better on at least one axis that is a common purchase decider.

Original yes, but it also launched only on AT&T in US as well and wasn't all that successful. The real uptick in popularity started with IPhone 3G (with AppStore) which was available world wide.

I can't help but suspect that Jobs would have been happy to leave the iphone US exclusive if it had not been for the gray market of jailbroken phones.

Hell, i could have sworn he had to be talked down from lawyerbombing jailbreakers and cydia into the ground.

> I can't help but suspect that Jobs would have been happy to leave the iphone US exclusive if it had not been for the gray market of jailbroken phones.

Why wouldn't he want to sell it worldwide and make Apple significantly more money?

This. I knew everyone from seniors, the a police chief, to tech folks carrying Windows phones. The apps we needed were there. But Microsoft had a nearly-useless approach to hardware releases, they constantly missed the boat.

I currently carry the last Windows Mobile phone on Verizon (the US' largest carrier). It is from 2014. (Actually, a new Elite x3 is coming out next week, three years later.) This is ridiculous. When the Elite x3 originally came out, we wondered what insanity was someone releasing a phone "for enterprise" that didn't work on Verizon, the main carrier of enterprise users.

We didn't need apps, we needed phones.

> someone releasing a phone "for enterprise" that didn't work on Verizon, the main carrier of enterprise users

Whose fault is this though? Was it missing a particular radio band, or was it anti-competitive behaviour by Verizon? I'm used to just buying phones and slipping in the SIM.

Verizon has a certification process, but they are effectively required by law to accept all compatible phones. Microsoft didn't even submit any of their recent phones for Verizon certification, even if they had chips which supported Verizon bands. Actually, HP is just now (like, this month) releasing a version of the Elite x3 that is Verizon-certified.

https://opendevelopment.verizonwireless.com/get-certified

https://opendevelopment.verizonwireless.com/device-showcase/...

We needed quality control as well, something which is very lacking at the moment. The sheer amount of bugs I hit trying to get my daughter's Lumia 650 up was ridiculous.