MS culture indeed.
I think Windows Phone died early because ecosystems are a natural monopoly and Apple grabbed the only niche outside of that but took a long time to vanish because of MS’s market power. The following chart shows the momentum got created in 2009, got in motion in 2010, and by Q1 2011 the fat lady had sung, with one ecosystem rising, one flat, the rest fading rapidly: https://www.statista.com/statistics/266136/global-market-share-held-by-smartphone-operating-systems/ . Buying Nokia to prevent them from going Android or sticking withthe sinking Symbian ship was just a ripple and didn’t fix the core issues and death feedback loop: bad UX, no users, no apps. MS was indeed to inward-focused to be aware of that.
I used an HTC HD2 in 2010–2011, and while I was delighted with the device as a phone, PDA and media machine (the hardware was excellent, it had all the needed apps and lots of storage), MS’s attitude convinced me to drop WinPhone and aggressively evangelize against it.
1- MS insisted on shoehorning the desktop Windows UI onto a small screen. Coming from the excellently touch-optimized Palm UI, Windows Phone’s UI was ridiculous, complete with windows and drop-downs that ran outside the screen. OEMs tried to overcome that with customizations, but even when those were good, they never ran very deep at the OS level, and couldn’t fix the apps.
2- MS showed utter disdain for its users. My then-current HTC HD2 couldn’t sync with my then-current Windows desktop. I got told that was normal and intended, because a new version WinPhone was coming up and… let’s screw our current users, who cares about early adopters and faithful customers ? That attitude went on for a long time, with the rapid-fire release of “Modern” WinPhone versions that were throw-away by design, orphaning yet more users and devs.
I don’t think the license price was much of an issue, it isn’t on the desktop.