I think Windows Phone was just wildly mismanaged. I say this as someone who bought a WP7 phone very early on because I found the UI so compelling.
MS were obviously caught on the back foot. WP7 was based heavily on Windows Mobile because that was all they had ready to go at the time. Then they rebooted the OS entirely with WP8 (based on NT, should have always been that way), removing backwards compatibility for existing apps and phones. Personally I gave up on Windows Phone right there and then: they'd obsoleted a phone I bought (IIRC) a little over a year previously.
You might be right that as time went on they might have made it a success. Certainly, they had the resources to keep throwing money at it until they did. But those early missteps really hurt them. You need passionate evangelists for your product, I’m only half joking when I say they should have swallowed the cost and upgraded every WP7 owners phone for free.
MS were obviously caught on the back foot. WP7 was based heavily on Windows Mobile because that was all they had ready to go at the time. Then they rebooted the OS entirely with WP8 (based on NT, should have always been that way), removing backwards compatibility for existing apps and phones. Personally I gave up on Windows Phone right there and then: they'd obsoleted a phone I bought (IIRC) a little over a year previously.
You might be right that as time went on they might have made it a success. Certainly, they had the resources to keep throwing money at it until they did. But those early missteps really hurt them. You need passionate evangelists for your product, I’m only half joking when I say they should have swallowed the cost and upgraded every WP7 owners phone for free.