This story goes through a play-by-play of the bad sectors for MS mobile over the years, & broadly concludes that MS didn't push hard enough or didn't embrace hardware soon enough. I find it boring and ignorant and not contributive in how it puts each step through the wash and then makes a broad generalization of what MS ought of have done, which is unsubstantiated "dream big" koolaid.

MS never had a chance. They had no apparent technical choice but to ride their historical platform's success into the new mobile world, to reshape the interface and APIs that had served them then into new ones that would build a platform. That didn't exactly fail, but the platform was as ancient decrepit and unappealing to outside developers as it got, and a rough start for hardware makers. The article places the blame on MS for not making hardware but even if they had better hardware offerings it's hard to imagine the software side of things- app makers, app store buyers- having taken off. Where were the kingmakers- the various software developers willing to put hard work into an app store that would barely pay out- willing to invest enormously in a platform with few competitive advantages, a small market, and the most aged platform around? Was there anything technically exciting about the software stack to lead devs to it? Were devs going to get broad expert wisdom from using the MS stack? No. MS software platform has been an unsophisticated, isolated, lonesome base. There's been well over a decade of C# and a consistent decade of that .NET platform having F# as the one lure for devs that want to feel better about themselves.

MS at least tried to get JS devs somewhat on board, but it was still far shy of the sophisticated olive branch WebOS had held out. The general unappeal was furthered crippled by IDE demands- for the longest time and probably still today MS assumes it was ok to have Windows Phone developers have Microsoft OSes. A massive number of devs escaped to OSX long ago to run web-oriented OSS, and the legion of Linux has remained unphased over the decades now: neither had much enthuse for picking up MS toolchains, for regardless of how good they and their IDEs are or what merits they bring they've always been distant worlds from the normative baseline Linux that the biggest segments of software development (web development) target and ship on.

> Perhaps the biggest reason why Windows Phone (and later Windows Mobile) suffocated was that there was a vacuum of consumer enthusiasm.

If one is asking the question, why did the platform fail, this is an inadequate response. No one buying it is a symptom of failure, not a cause. I've suggested that the reason no one bought the platform was because there was no software for it, and there was no software for it because everyone had already had 20 years of Windows development and thought it was A) pretty technically boring by now and B) that those skills wouldn't translate into the pertinent money making skill of building "master-server" software that actually runs the internet and makes all the money (Google, Facebook, &c). The Windows Phone platform had no draw for the developers. People are only interested in what the platform brings them, and one of our primary senses of how vibrant and useful a platform is is having good stories showing ongoing progress for the software launched on that platform. MS could never create that story by themselves, no matter how well they made the platform and how much software they built for it- the sign that a platform is doing ok is when it is widely and independently developed for, and the way to draw developers into that is to either already be a huge cash cow or to make yourself hugely accessible to existing software development sectors. WinJS wasn't a complete failure in accessibility, but it also wasn't seamless and doable enough for the Macbook and Linux crowd, who have been busy getting sizable paychecks building web-apps for a long time now.