Scott Jordan
Jul 27, 2017 · 1 min read

Insightful and enjoyable as always, Jean-Louis. And there are a couple of additional wrinkles to consider.

Mostly: Windows Phone was not Microsoft’s first or only foray into building a phone platform. Remember their $500 million acquisition of Danger? Its Sidekick phones were immensely popular, especially with teens. And it was headed by no less than Andy Rubin. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Danger_Inc.). Oh, and there was the Kin Phone too (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Kin).

Pull the thread and you’ll uncover enough layers of organizational, managerial and marketing dysfunction to feed the biz-school case-study industry for a generation.

Botching an initial foray into a new market is not unusual. But what’s especially vexing is how wrong Microsoft continued to get it over several tries, as compared to Apple’s spot-on second act after its first toe-in-the-water with the Motorola Rokr.

I expect the difference stems from modern-day Apple’s unique business model: find something that sucks and do it right. For cell phones that meant upending everything from the way phones are sold to the way they’re updated to the way they function and interact.

    Scott Jordan

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    Nanotech