A disaster that was released in 2012? In the fourth quarter of 2012 Windows 8 phones had sold around 6 million handsets.

http://www.neowin.net/news/gartner-windows-phone-sales-incre...

I'm sure you must have been saying the same thing about Android then huh?

By comparison they only sold around 640K handsets in 2008 (their first year of release) then sold around 6 million in 2009.

http://digithoughts.com/post/21428797724/android-and-apple-s...

WP7 was released in 2010. Three years later they now have an estimated 3.3% market share. If that's not a failure for company the size of Microsoft, and with the millions spent on marketing, I don't know what is.

I'll never say never, but it's looking pretty much like the Zune. Nice and solid product with some nifty features, but not different enough to dethrone the dominant players.

The problem is that Apple dominates the high-end and calls the shots regarding the operators (that by experience knows that they will lose customers if they don't offer the iPhone), while Google panders to all the OEMs by giving away a very capable operating system with top notch apps, and to operators by allowing them to customize it with crapware.

There's the May 2011 purchase of Skype. A year later Nokia said that made Windows Phone toxic to a lot of carriers; I have to say it doesn't look like wise move in conjunction with the Windows Phone effort.

Not a valid comparison - the smartphone market was much smaller in 2008. The percentages would be more interesting/valid, but that's exactly the problem - the market is getting closer to saturation/more mature now and so Windows Phone has more trouble getting elbow room because of it.

Yep. WP should have been released much earlier.