Last week Microsoft quietly buried its smartphone ambitions with the announcement they would shed 1,850 jobs largely from the remains of the Nokia business they acquired four years ago.
Microsoft’s Lumia exercise was expensive for the company but even more costly in terms of missed opportunities.
Those opportunities are now in cloud computing and artificial intelligence services. Shareholders will be hoping the current CEO Satya Nadell executes a lot better on them than his predecessor did with smartphones.
Windows Phone was a lovely alternative to iOS and, in itself, a far better user interface than Android. The irony is it never got traction because Microsoft failed to build the bazaar of third-party apps to support the phones, ironic because that’s precisely what Microsoft got right over the years with Windows on PCs.