> Microsoft lost because they didn't have the users or the apps

I wonder how much of it was because they had a sorry arse mobile browser? Not supporting ontouchstart etc events must have been a killer. MSPointerEvent was awfully buggy in the initial release, and what dev wants to rewrite their web app/page to use PointerEvent?

Why wouldn't you make sure Hybrid apps (Cordova etc) work well? Why not just copy WKWebView (20/20 hindsight now!).

Their equivalent of WKWebView is some sort of zombie IE11 version (not edge, with different features and flaws than IE11 desktop). Hideous.

Disclosure: we developed a Hybrid app for Windows Phone (based on Xamarin).

Not just the browser, the whole platform was crap to develop for. My company ported a bunch of apps by a major app publisher to various versions of Windows Phone and the documentation was shitty, the APIs were shitty, everything shifted with each new version and everything was buggy. We kept asking our local Microsoft branch for help (backed by the publisher we were porting for) and more often than not they were powerless to help.

A far cry from developers, developers, developers.

Even Microsoft themselves dropped the ball, when it took over a year for them to release Skype - which they owned - for their own mobile platform (if I'm remembering correctly, i had a Windows Phone and rather liked it).

A platform without users or apps and years late is not one I'd call superior. Good ideas are not nearly enough, as they often say around HN.

I thought it was pretty clear from the poster's message he was talking about product sans network effects.

An inferior product can win because this inferior product you talked about had already won by the time this superior product came along. Microsoft just didn't want to admit it.