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- cross-posted to:
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The Finnish company Jolla is back with the Linux-powered Jolla Phone. It’s being positioned as an antidote to the US-dominated smartphone status quo of Android and iOS.
Money was not the issue. Timing and smarts were.
Timing is a given… the whole point is now there is a duopoly it’s impossible to compete.
Windows Phone OS was excellent, smooth, efficient and relatively intuitive with flagship models competing with Google and Apple.
The problem was getting apps created for the App Store with the lowest market share. The phone sector was losing money, it did that for years with no great improvement in market share. The call was made entirely because Microsoft can’t have a red mark on their balance sheet for that long without investors getting annoyed.
It was the money.
And why was there such a poor app ecosystem and low market share? Because Android and iOS had already cornered the market before Microsoft decided in late 2010 (!) to make a half-assed attempt at entering the market. And if you’re so late to the game, you must at least do it smartly and offer features the others don’t. Microsoft did not, and thus had to back off eventually.
So if you look closely, it was timing and smarts.
I wouldn’t call $7.6 billion half-assed, but maybe that’s just me.
I can throw $100 billion at a problem and still have a half-assed strategy, causing the money to burn up in the process. (I’d really love try this out, btw. I’m just $100 billion short.)