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Mountain_Skies parent
They shot themselves in the foot right out the gate by trying to copy Apple's $99 annual fee for developers to publish their apps. Whatever initial enthusiasm there was for Windows Phone quickly disappeared when they added that requirement. When they finally figured out it wasn't going to be a new revenue stream, they reduced it for a while instead of eliminating it. When they finally realized just how badly they had messed up and removed all the fees, most developers had already moved on and never gave Windows Phone another look.

It reminds me of the failure of Windows Home Server. It was removed from MSDN because the product manager said developers needed to buy a copy of it if they wanted to develop extensions and products for Home Server. Very few bothered. However many dozen licenses the policy lead to being purchased was dwarfed by the failure of the product to gain market share. Obviously that wasn't only due to alienating developers but it certainly was part of it.

btown
> When they finally realized just how badly they had messed up and removed all the fees

Apparently this didn't even happen until 2018, and only then as a limited-time promo! https://www.windowscentral.com/microsoft-slashes-windows-pho...

To be sure, as noted in this 12-year-old Reddit thread on the program https://www.reddit.com/r/windowsphone/comments/1e6b24/if_mic... - part of the reason for a fee-to-publish is to prevent malware and other bad actors. But it's not the only way to do so.

First-movers can get revenue from supply-quality guardrails. Second-movers need to be hyper-conscious that suppliers have every reason not to invest time in their platform, and they have to innovate on how to set up quality guardrails in other way.

dabbz
I personally point the blame on their constant breaking of SDK and API surfaces. From 7 to 8 and then to 10, so many APIs that were in use just broke and had no real 1:1 equivalent. I also think the death of Silverlight had a hand in it.
anonymars
Not to mention that when they moved to SDK 8, you could only develop from a Windows 8 machine, that famously popular OS. So many unforced errors, many seeming to stem from denial that Microsoft does not possess the Apple Reality Distortion Field
StillBored
What I don't understand is all this MBA training and everyone thinks they can copy the crazy margins that Apple has pulled off while being 12-24 months behind them. Be that matching the ipad's price point with obviously inferior hardware and no ecosystem like HP/Webos, or tossing up little fee's that act as roadblocks in the apple ecosystem to avoid noise/trash and end up just slowing they growth of the app market everywhere else.

And it continues to this day, when one looks at the QC/Windows laptop pricing, or various other trailing technology stacks that think they can compete in apples playground.

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