Good words by Benedict Evans, from Andreessen Horowitz, on his own blog, ben-evans.com:
Though a big part of Microsoft’s mobile strategy has been to push towards common code across Windows on the desktop and on mobile, so that it’s easy to write apps for both at the same time, in practice that’s largely irrelevant. The apps that people want on smartphones are not being written for desktop Windows anyway. Uber doesn’t have a desktop Windows app, and neither does Instacart, Pinterest or Instagram. […] You can’t tempt developers to support Windows Phone by saying ‘it’s easy to deploy your desktop app to mobile’ if there is no desktop app. So Windows is not a point of leverage for Microsoft in mobile. […]
So, Microsoft has missed mobile […]. […]
The smartphone is the sun and everything else orbits it […]. […]
Microsoft has two huge, profitable businesses in Windows and Office: they will slowly go away, so how do you use them to create something new? Instead of every new project having in some way to support Office and Windows, how do you use Office and Windows to support the future? […]
I don’t have a complete sense of what that looks like, but admitting defeat [as Microsoft has done by drastically scaling back its smartphone efforts] is the first step to working it out.
