Charles Arthur for The Guardian:
To add to all the advice being ladled out to Satya Nadella, Microsoft’s new chief, here’s another piece: stop bothering with Windows Phone. It’s a waste of money which will never pay off.
[…] Here’s the thing: Windows Phone was too late in coming to the smartphone race: when it was released in October 2010, the starting gun had long been fired. The race had been on for years before Microsoft showed up with a competitive product, and that meant the rival ecosystems had plenty of time to capture markets.
Charles Arthur present several valid arguments for it’s time for Microsoft to swallow their losses and leave Windows Phone behind. It doesn’t seem very likely that Microsoft will listen to them, though – at least not yet.
Even if Satya Nadella supported the idea he would need Microsofts board to go through with it, and there’s little chance they would get behind such a radical strategy. Microsoft has invested enormous resources in Windows Phone in the past five years. To be forced to abandon their efforts now would be a huge setback.