Re: Microsoft scrapping WP royalties
Had Microsoft had zero royalties for WP7 from day one, back when Android was a fuddled mess in the 1.x and 2.x days, they probably would have had a much better market share.
I doubt it. Windows Mobile had a rock bottom share since forever, and anything associated to Windows Mobile would usually see their market shrink & die in a matter of months, or years if they were really lucky. See Palm, Sendo, even HTC. It isn't really a wonder that WP7 also dragged Nokia from #1 OS (Symbian) to "right next to the Other category". It also didn't help that when MS dumped WinMo 6.5 for the full rewrite WP7, they had already done the "dump & rewrite" trick a couple of times already. Remember Windows CE? A lot of stuff was deprecated/obsoleted when they dumped that in favor of Windows Mobile. Some devs commented that they were feeling deja vu on the whole issue; the thing is that by WP7's announcement, it was far more profitable to develop for iOS or Android than the dying WP/WinMo ecosystem. Hell, even BlackBerry looked more promising than WP!
Biting the hand that feeds IT
