Who cares? The smartphone market is rapidly maturing and it won't matter who was first and who wasn't. Do you know if Toyota started producing cars years or decades after Ford? Do you care?
The car <-> technology gets thrown around a lot; sometimes it's apt, other times not so much. This is definitely one of the latter.
The smartphone market is rapidly maturing, but that doesn't mean it can sustain a multitude of niche players indefinitely. Unlike in the car market, we'll likely only see a handful of major players able to participate profitably as the market settles a bit.
I'm not saying that Microsoft's doomed, they've certainly got the wherewithal to last longer than a failing RIM might or Palm/HP did, but in order to ever have a hit, they'll have to come up with some combination of killer new features, apps and devices.
So far, they're batting 0/3 on that front:
1) Mango is catching up to Android/iOS, but you're kidding yourself if you don't believe it's at least a little late to the game.
2) I certainly haven't heard of any killer apps for WP7 and as a developer, I've heard 0 interest in changing that. I'd love to play around with WP 7 and maybe even see what I could create for the platform, but without interest from my clients, it's DOA for me (and for customers).
3) The devices are mostly rehashes from Android models, and even those that aren't don't differentiate themselves from other medium-tier phones.
Great design is important, and I think most (technical) people will agree that Metro got it right, but claiming it's not successful because of that great design and not accounting for the two years it took to get to that point (the cost of lagging around with 6.5 and such while Apple / Android were building new platforms) is purposely misleading.
>The devices are mostly rehashes from Android models, and even those that aren't don't differentiate themselves from other medium-tier phones.
This is a problem that Android has created for the mobile phone market. Android has undeniably the worst performance of the three, and to compensate for that the handheld makers have started a spec race. Only when you get to superphone levels does Android really shine.
On the other hand, properly designed and controlled systems like iOS and WP7 don't require massive processing power to run smoothly. 1Ghz is perfectly fine, but I hear the complaint all the time that WP7 doesn't interest people because it's not dual core 1.5Ghz chips inside. It doesn't have it because it doesn't need it. Any other feature you'd like (slide out speaker, kickstand, keyboard, massive 5" screen, etc), it's got it. If you get out of the mindset that faster chips means more performance, WP7 has hardware out there that suits any need.
It took Toyota decades to enter the established american market. You might not care today who was first, but you are talking about a relatively ancient business. If you are arguing that 80 years from now, it won't matter, then I agree.
Also, you are missing that my two points intersect. Toyota has an strong brand, especially when it came/comes to reliability/quality/value. For most people buying cars, these are important qualities. So yes, they took the #1 spot because of the product they built and the brand they have. Microsoft's brand is so tarnished that it's way more of an uphill battle.
I find it hard to understand how people don't see the importance of brand loyalty in the face of Apple's extreme success.
Microsoft could do like Datsun and change to a better brand name. Meet the Nissan Phone 7.
>I find it hard to understand how people don't see the importance of brand loyalty in the face of Apple's extreme success.
That's not brand loyalty, that's marketing. The next company to market and design like/better than Apple will gobble that "brand loyalty" right up. Unfortunately that likely won't be Google or Microsoft.
Exactly correct on the brand loyalty, for example Motorola won the "loyalty" of virtually the entire mobile phone market in North America twice, once with the Star-Tac generation of phones and again with the Razr generation.
We all know what happened to them wen their products sucked too much for too long.
I have wondered whether sales of WP7 would be better had they either named it something else (without the word windows) or have it owned by a separate/new company/subsidiary. Though I suspect that, for the time being, their lateness to market is the real killer (and the brand issue the ongoing on).
Who cares? The smartphone market is rapidly maturing and it won't matter who was first and who wasn't. Do you know if Toyota started producing cars years or decades after Ford? Do you care?