Just watched a video on the failure of windows phone, they went from 34% market share ( world top 1) to 1.4% in 5 years. Then they recover a little bit to 3%, just to drop to 0.4% 5 year later and then completely dead 2 years after.
Never at any point in time did the Windows phone reach 34% market share or anywhere near #1. I’m not even sure Windows phone had a bigger share than BlackBerry at the time.
Their peak market share was 3.4%, not 34%. It failed because virtually nobody bought them.
The only piece of Microsoft tech that I actually loved, so sad it flopped. I had two Windows phones, beautiful devices. Gorgeous screens, great design, the Windows 8 tiles unironically were fantastic on mobile.
Everything was butter smooth, I never had them crash or freeze up. Zeiss cameras, they took great pictures.
But there were almost no apps for them. It was basically the Microsoft mobile office suite, and a few random ports like Evernote. Nobody bought them because there was zero ecosystem for them.
That’s not “Windows phone” that’s “Windows mobile”, the precursor to Windows Phone, which didn’t release until 2010.
Shifting to Windows Mobile now, in 2006, Windows Mobile 6 had only about 10% market share, behind both Palm OS and Symbian, the latter of which held a whopping 60%. I looked further back in time and I do see that Windows Mobile had a 34% market share in 2001, however it was again dwarfed by PalmOS. It’s also worth it to note that that 34% wasn’t comprised mainly of cellphones, but rather barcode scanning guns in warehouses and logistics, because you could make custom applications for them with relative ease. There are still warehouses today that use those old windows mobile scanner guns.