Nadella, Gates, and Ballmer have all admitted to Microsoft’s mobile mistakes.

Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella admits giving up on Windows Phone and mobile was a mistake::Satya Nadella wrote off Microsoft’s Nokia phone business acquisition and now says the company’s exit from mobile was a mistake.

  • bassomitron@lemmy.worldEnglish
    41·
    1 year ago

    That is a bad take, IMO. More competition in the phone OS market is better than the virtually 2 that we have now (yes, I know there are alternatives, but android and ios collectively make up over 98% of the OS market). They’re all offered by terrible companies, yes, but letting Google and Apple completely dominate the market unchecked hasn’t exactly resulted in a healthy situation, either.

    Source for mobile OS percentage: https://www.techrepublic.com/article/ios-vs-android-market-share/

    https://finance.yahoo.com/news/ios-vs-android-market-share-135251641.html

    • Nottheengineer@lemmy.sdf.orgEnglish
      73·
      1 year ago

      I agree competition is generally a good thing, but microsoft has demonstrated that they can’t do it.

      Android is open source at least, so the people who give a shit can run a custom ROM that works without google stuff or at least sandboxes it so it can’t do anything the user doesn’t want it to.

      A proper solution would be to mandate that manufacturers ship their phones without proprietary software so that users have to actively make the decision between installing google/apple/manufacturer services and alternatives.

      Custom ROMs work that way already, you flash them and then you flash google apps or microG. You could also flash neither of those if you wanted to.

      Flashing from recovery has already gotten easy with TWRP, so manufacturers could streamline that to make it foolproof for the initial setup process.

      (commenting from another instance since feddit.de is having issues right now, please @ the other account as well if you reply)

    • CmdrShepard@lemmy.oneEnglish
      11·
      1 year ago

      I think more competition is good, but it’s highly unlikely that the behemoth Microsoft would provide the type of competition that would really benefit the consumer. More likely they’d be competing against Apple and Google to see who could extract the most money and data out of their users.

      • Kushan@lemmy.worldEnglish
        1·
        1 year ago

        An Ubuntu like alternative exists and has existed for over a decade. Canonical abandoned it a few years back and someone else is trying to develop it but there’s basically zero interest or traction.

        Mozilla also tried it with Firefox OS.