

The Windows Mobile era took a heavy toll on Microsoft's mobile efforts





Steve Ballmer
[Image Source: SFGate]




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RE: Windows 8 Phone is great
By Tony Swash on 2/18/2013 7:51:47 PM , Rating: -1


A quick factual correction, Mac OS X was not released in the late 90s (other than public beta previews) MacOSX Version 10.0 wasn't released until 2001.

Macs in the 1990s, certainly compared to Macs post Jobs and post MacOSX, may have been garbage in the 1990s but they were always less awful and less garbage like than the contemporaneous versions of Windows. The old pre-MacOSX systems were always better, and significantly better, than the version of Windows they competed against and the story of Windows has always been the same: striving to catch up in performance, features and design to the Mac OS, but finding that by the time it does the Mac OS had moved on again and is still out in front. MacOSX was the big step change because it was only with Windows 7, years after MacOSX got on the road, did Microsoft come close to MacOSX and but even Windows 7 only really matched MacOSX 10.3. Windows 8 is of course a massive step back.

But none of that mattered because it's not the innate qualities of the OS that determines platform success or failure, what determines which platform succeeds is actually pretty complex, and what determines platform success in the PC market is different to what determines platform success in the mobile device market. One illustration of that is how market share was a very good proxy measurement of platform performance in the PC markets and it's a poor proxy measurement of platform performance in the mobile device markets (hence iOS with a smaller market share out performs Android as a platform so easily and by so much).

