The code base for WinMobile was a horrible, disgusting mess. The build system is one of the worst I've ever seen.

MS let WinMobile rot internally for years, building up tons of technical debt, and they paid for it in market share.

I was on a project that was repurposing pieces of the WM6 code, just cherry-picking drivers and stuff. We used to go rummaging through the source code on "Wait, you thought /that/ was bad..." sessions.

The BSPs ("Board Support Packages") that provided drivers and and other low-level code for the various platforms that WM ran on were written by third parties, largely by contractors, largely by the /same/ contractors, and the code quality was again terrible.

Don't ever let code quality and good system design take a back seat to politics, personal agendas or convenience. That kind of nonsense is at the core of why MS is not a major power in the mobile market today. Senior management at MS utterly dropped the ball; I like to think it's because the upper echelons don't really read code or look at designs any more.

That's really insightful.

The code ended up being that awful to maintain because of deadlines pressures or Microsoft inherited the code base from a buyout of another company?

The code was awful because there was no accountability. No oversight. Nothing happened to you if you checked in junk, as long as it compiled. Q/A was happy if their tests ran and every function did mindless NULL checking on parameters.

You're mixing the time frames.

When Widows Mobile Smartphone came out in 2003, it was the most advanced, most open, most app-friendly phone OS. However, there were not substantial improvements for the next 5 years - the product was in fact stillborn. The Windows Phone team was then brought in to bury the corpse, and start afresh, which is what they did. It wasn't their fault that the predecessor has died several years earlier.

Microsoft invented their own troubles in this market. How many parallel mobility teams can one company reasonably sustain -

a) Windows phone 6.5

b) Windows phone 7.x

c) Windows phone 8.x

d) Project Pink / Kin

e) Danger

f) Windows 8 RT

g) Courier

To be fair, those teams were not parallel. 6.5 died with 7, which died with 8. Danger was a subsidiary, and they made Project Pink, so they're the same. Windows on ARM, yes, was a team, but not associated with Mobility. They're a Windows 8 team, not a Windows Phone team, so they're not actually competing with WP nor are they working on mobility-specific platforms. They simply deal with Windows on ARM processors. And finally, we don't know where the Courier team fit into the whole plan, since it was an incubation project.

Therefore, we get:

- Windows Phone

- Windows on ARM

- Danger/Pink

And then some Courier Team, probably a MS Research team (so not part of an actual commercial team) which I wouldn't count as a team.

Then, Danger was folded into Windows Phone, and Courier was killed off, leaving:

- Windows Phone

- Windows on ARM

PMX wasn't Danger, and PMX did Pink/Kin. Danger was folded into PMX, true, but the history is way messier than you're letting on. Some of the survivors of the PMX fiasco / power grab went on to Courier.

WoA did absorb some parts of WiMo (power management, for example).

The whole thing makes me want to cry in frustration. The day the iPhone was announced, the halls of 116-117-118-119 were filled with shell shocked, demoralized, pissed off people.

I was using whatever information is available publicly about the teams. Blame the internet for an oversimplification.

Sure thing. I thought you were a Microsoft insider for some reason, my error.

Though I agree with much of your comment, I think you're missing the timing a bit. I don't think it is the transition team specifically that is the issue, but rather the leadership did not recognize where the market was going, or didn't think the market was big enough to dedicate the right resources. Big mistake. They shouldn't have been responding to Apple and Android, they should have been leading it all.

This is probably a good example of the innovators dilemma in action.

I also disagree that Android is the 'true successor to Windows Mobile'. Sure it is somewhat more open than WP, but I don't think openness is what is a key part of Android's success.

wut? I don't recall Windows mobile ever being usable, or "owning the smart phone market". Where are you located in the world?

I was working in the mobile business before the iPhone came and owned everybody (waiting then for Android) and I recall things totally differently than you.

The smartphone market was owned by Nokia and their Sxx series. That and the BlackBerries.

We were working on mostly Nokia (either native or Java), Qualcomm BREW (C++) and, granted, we had some demand for Windows Mobile but they were pretty much a nobody in that pre-iPhone world. Just as they're still nobody.

There was hardly any customer demand for Windows Mobile compared to Nokia and the others.

There has been no "transition" because MS never was anywhere that mattered with their phones.

It has always been an utter failure.

Now of course you may your definition of a "pre-iPhone Smartphone" which appears to be: "Certainly not a BlackBerry and certainly not anything that wasn't running Windows Mobile". So then it becomes hard to argue ; )

>There has been no "transition" because MS never was anywhere that mattered with their phones ...

That's not really true because there was the PDA market, which was dominated by Palm and Microsoft. So you had RIM and Nokia in one corner, and Palm and Microsoft in the other. Any one of them could have created the iPhone but none of them really got it, and they are where they are.

This is fairly illusory as a comparison. I don't believe the PDA market ever amounted to more than 12 million devices a year. Whilst by the year 2000 the entire mobile phone market was around 700 million.

Plus it didn't help that MS were trying to charge unrealistic prices for the OS, in 1999 they were asking for $80 per unit....

Pre-iPhone, there was a small PDA market, a bigger smartphone market, and a huge cell phone market. PDAs are a precursor to the iPhone, as much as (if not more than) Blackberries and Symbian phones. Both Palm and Microsoft were experimenting with PDAs with phone functionality years before the iPhone (which is why Ballmer was so dismissive of the iPhone at launch). They were so very close.

Yes, PDAs existed and you could see an evolution of phone to smartphone which included PDA like features.

However, in the early 00s the money was in dumbphones simply because the BOM cost of the RAM/ROM, AP and modem was pretty high.

The real migration path was from phones, either in terms of incorporating PDA like features in to existing platforms like Series 40, or using an OS capable of running in low memory, execute in place environments.

IMO Symbian was much more capable of achieving that need than either Palm or MS, at least because of it's low memory requirements and it's OS architecture was more advanced so it didn't have pseudo-arbitrary limits such as the 32 process limit that W/E had:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_Embedded_CE_6.0

Also obviously the Symbian heritage was from PDAs (EPOC32 from PSION). I'm not saying that Symbian was a great OS, however, it really had the measure of MS technically in those times and Palm OS at that time was well known to be in the stone-age OS wise.

Microsoft existed in the PDA space to keep Palm from growing.

Lets face it, the secret sauce to smartphones from a technology POV is the web and web services. Microsoft had disbanded its IE team after the release of IE6, and thought that they had put the Internet problem to bed.

You can write a book on the number of missteps and missed opportunities Microsoft had in the last 10-15 years. They missed the boat on everything from search, to web-mail, to social networks, to digital music, to smartphones.

>Microsoft had disbanded its IE team after the release of IE6

I remember when that news hit slashdot like it was yesterday. I remember because I got really angry at Microsoft and their idiocy. I actually thought ie6 was a decent browser, but there was no fuckin chance it was going to be-all and end-all of browsers. It was also the day that I really started looking for an alternative. Soon after, I installed Firebird beta and never looked back.

Disbanded the IE rendering engine team.

The PDA market was ridiculously small (I owned one and I hardly knew anyone else who did) and was not growing at the time. PDAs were pricey, and while they could do many of the things that the iPhone did later, most people did not see its value back then. Well, it was a very fragmented market focused only on professionals. It was never aimed to consumers (a big mistake).

>Whilst by the year 2000 the entire mobile phone market was around 700 million.

What was the size of the smartphone market? I'd guess it wasn't that big either, certainly it isn't anywhere near present-day numbers. And yes, I am differentiating between "smartphone" and "cell phone" market. The former was small, the latter was huge.

> Well, it was a very fragmented market focused only on professionals. It was never aimed to consumers (a big mistake).

You could say the same for RIM, who was never that interested in building a consumer phone. Many mistakes were made by all incumbents..

By the way, you may not be aware of this, but RIM had (and still has, somehow), a huge consumer following in certain countries like Indonesia because of the chat applications it provided ahead of the rest. Until not too long ago it was bigger than the iphone and Android phones there (I need to find a link for that, though...)

I live in South Africa. We are one of the countries with a huge RIM following, you can find a black berry device on every street corner.

The iPhone did what it could do because it bundled a data plan that was reasonable at the time ($20/month unlimited, though 2G only, was a pretty damn good deal). Prior to my iPhone I used a Treo 6xx series that Verizon wanted me to pay $45/m for data (2G also).

The lack of native data connectivity made PDAs deal with the continually nasty and ever under-estimated problem of sync. With iPhoneOS v1, Apple matched what Palm had to offer - an iPod touch was almost as good as a Palm PDA, an iPhone better than a Treo. With iOS2 and ActiveSync, it blew away it's competition.

Absolutely this. I had an XDA II, then an XDA Mini S pretty much from launch (rebranded HTC phones on O2-UK), but as a student simply couldn't afford the data plans to go with them.

The iPhone (and really, the iPhone 3G for me) is when prices started to become reasonable.. nowadays, you can get decent data plans with (almost) everyone here.

I cant really argue with to much of what you say, but in my defense as i said in my original post i dont really consider BB to be smartphones, i would also extend this to Symbian. Though this is entirely my opinion, most of which i would probably say is as much my bias to WM as anything :).

But at the same time if you look at the statistics here on market percentage [1], you see my main point to that windows has lost nearly all of its previous market share.

[1]

But WM's marketshare of the overall mobile phone market was never that large, so ya, they lost half, but half of a small share.

I don't see anything else Microsoft could have done with Windows Phone (disclosure: I'm a Microsoft employee but no inside info). I mean, the iPhone was pure disruption. Android then comes a long and destroys the market for OSes because they gave it away! So iPhone disrupts the high end, Android disrupts the low end, and Microsoft is put into an interesting non-trivial position.