Over the last couple of years, a lot of phone brands have lost their weight and a few names like Samsung and Apple remain. Among the forgotten brands is Microsoft as the company gave up on its device. The software giant's CEO even admits that the phone should've been developed better.
Windows Phone Could've Been Big
There's no telling whether Microsoft's phone would've been successful, but Microsoft Satya Nadella along with two other former chief executives believe that the company shouldn't have given up on developing the Windows Phone.
Back in 2015, a year after Nadella took over the position of the top executive, Microsoft wrote off $7.6 billion of its Nokia acquisition. He stated that one of the most difficult decisions he made then was their "exit" of mobile phones as it was defined then.
Microsoft had developed smartphones like the Lumia series in partnership with Nokia, but it failed to attract buyers compared to its major competitors, Samsung and Apple. After the write-off, Windows Phones were dead after a few years, as reported by The Verge.
"In retrospect, I think there could have been ways we could have made it work by perhaps reinventing the category of computing between PCs, tablets, and phones," Nadella added. Former CEOs found other flaws that caused the phone to fail.
Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates said that losing Android to Google was his "greatest mistake ever." The search engine giant acquired Android for $50 million, succeeding in its ultimate goal to beat Microsoft in the mobile phone market.
Despite all that, Microsoft still has a good business going on with both iOS and Android. It still develops apps for both operating systems. Some of its products like Microsoft Office on mobile are even preinstalled on certain Samsung devices.
The Fall of Windows Phones
A lot of famous brands in the past are no longer used now such as Blackberry and Nokia, and they are mostly kicked out of the market for not being able to catch up to the innovations that their competitors are releasing.
Some say that the Windows Phone started to die off around the time that Microsoft wrote the $7.6 billion off with the Nokia acquisition, but others argue that it was the beginning of the end for Microsoft's mobile phones when the first iPhone was released.
In the late 2000s, Windows was still working with brands like Sony Ericsson and HTC, as reported by ScreenRant. But seeing as those brands are no longer in the market now, it obviously did not work out for all parties.
Microsoft then acquired Nokia so it would not rely on other manufacturers to create its devices, but that did not pan out as well. It was years before the company admitted that the Windows Phone had reached a dead end, but they eventually announced it in 2017.
If Microsoft acquired Android before Google did back in 2005, we could have a different flagship lineup from the software giant right now. Instead of Google Pixels, Microsoft would've likely released their own phones using the Android OS and the manufacturing of Nokia.
