Jason L Ward

I've seen enough of these comments since the original post that I kind of feel like I have to respond. I'm not trying to make excuses. I absolutely am not trying to make excuses. But the deficiency in apps given our starting point was so broad let this becomes the de facto answer. I get it, there were people who had FOMO because they couldn't play the latest version of Candy Crush or Angry Birds. The Chase banking app wasn't available. I get it. But, again, combinatorial math makes it so that everybody is going to likely have one app that they can't get that their friends have that allows the discussion to pivot on "there weren't enough apps." If you look at the rate of growth of our app store versus Apple and even Google in their first handful of years, it was tremendous. We had a spam app problem where people were putting wrappers around websites and we had some other challenges, but the rate of growth was fantastic, and we engaged student developers to great success as well. That said, the starting point meant we were always going to have an apps problem. Therefore pointing to the apps as the reason for failure is almost as if you are saying de facto we should not have started. We built an amazing product. I actually think the biggest problem with our developer story was that we did not allow the tools that we used internally to be used by developers externally. Therefore the app experiences diverged. This was a lesser known problem. Monetization was a challenge because of # of customers. At the end of the day, it's hard to get developers excited when you can't sell the phones. It's hard to sell phones when salespeople in the stores have an iPhone on their hip and when the Windows Phone stuff is in the corner after a week or two of a big marketing push. This inability to pierce the salespeople at the points of retail is one of the big reasons why I was not a supporter of the Amazon Fire Phone when we started work on the Kindle app for it at Amazon. But that's a story for another day.

We were fighting an uphill battle trying to get the carriers to feature our phones with their sales people. You're just not going to win if you're getting generation behind handsets from Samsung, LG, etc. This was a primary reason why we had to buy Nokia. Even with that, getting the salespeople off the iOS bandwagon was almost impossible for the in-store sales. They would focus on us for a week or two around a launch, and then we got pushed to the corner of the store. The go-to answer was always to point to the size of the app store, which is just a lazy answer. Unfortunately, the sales people in the carrier stores would default to that answer, and then that's game over. We had a lot of the major apps, but if you're missing that one core app that a salesperson used in the top 50, that ripple effect from that one salesperson was a really rough go. The combinatorial math got out of control when you consider the number of salespeople and likelihood of one of their required top 50 apps not being on the Windows Phone platform.