@L05ER
"The only winphone issue with any real weight behind it was lack of apps..."
Eehm, no.
I'm a first generation Windows Phone user and I still enjoy the environment (a bit). Right now I use Windows Phone mostly because it's not Google, but that's another topic.
The issues with Windows Phone are much bigger than you claim. However, you're partially right that the first generation also had application issues. For starters it didn't have a todo list, something a bit trivial for a business phone I'd say. But that wasn't even half of it.
It took Microsoft a while but eventually we got an update and what do you know? Finally a todo list. Yeah, about that... If you had Outlook you could synchronize basic appointments and gain access to e-mail, but synchronizing todo items with Outlook has never worked on WP 7. You couldn't even reliably synchronize them with Hotmail!
And WP 7 was also a problem in itself. See: when it hit the shelves Microsoft made very strict and tight demands to hardware producers. You were not allowed to make "low end" phones, the specs had to match the minimum requirements, otherwise you were not allowed to call it a "Windows Phone". That made many users believe that Microsoft was adapting the same strategy as they did for Windows: long term support. Surely they did this with updates and upgrades in mind, right?
Nope! Only a few months later WP8 got announced and roughly 1 year later (granted: a little more life span than your average mobile phone) WP 8 got released. Leaving many first-gen users frustrated, because apparently we bought into a beta run. While Microsoft did their utmost best to make it look as if they were really putting weight into Windows Phone. Turns out they did, but preferred WP 8.
"Bought a Windows Phone? Cool, get ready as we're about to release WP 8 so you can buy into it AGAIN!"
Then, developers... They were very keen to promote Windows Phone and provide SDK's (which were pretty good in my opinion). I also installed the stuff into Visual Studio and started working. Then eventually I felt confident enough to try and hack my own phone. Well... I got an error: it was locked, you couldn't do anything unless Microsoft unlocked it. Which they would only do for approx. E 110,-.
Paying E110,- only for getting the right to mess with my OWN phone? Later on this got lowered through some weird "refund actions" (as if anyone would trust Microsoft at this point) and a little more later things were free. You had to register and then you could enjoy your phone.
But can you imagine how many geeks (so: pretty devoted fans) already got massively disappointed and decided that it might be more fun to jump ships?
Can it get any worse? Of course it can! Just when people finally got around WP8 a little bit the next generation was announced.
And that's not even mentioning all the obvious weird stuff us users had to endure. I mean.. so here I have a Windows Phone with wifi and bluetooth support. So why can't I access my Windows clients (and/or server) shares over the network? When I have a file which I want to put on my phone I have to upload it to SkyDrive (oops, sorry: OneDrive), then my phone has to access that and if I'm lucky and the filetype gets recognized I can actually copy it to my phone. Or not.. Sometimes it also insists that it would only access the file online.
Now, a lot of this stuff got fixed over time, and the latest Win10 version also improved a lot. Absolutely no denying that.
But it doesn't solve the problem: after all this misery happening, how many users / geeks / fans do you think still cared? Plenty of users got upset and decided to bail out or simply not get a new Windows Phone but sit it out to see what might happen.
So many things went wrong that it's not even funny anymore :/
Biting the hand that feeds IT
