Microsoft’s 2010 “iPhone funeral” is a classic lesson in corporate overconfidence

Description

The meme has a dark-themed tweet style header that reads: "If you ever feel stupid just remember in 2010 Microsoft held a funeral for the iPhone after launching the windows phone 7." Below the text, a photo shows four Microsoft employees in black capes carrying a coffin shaped like an oversized Windows Phone 7 handset, complete with bright tile icons on its screen; two of the bearers wear sandwich-board signs featuring the old Windows logo. Bystanders watch from the sidewalk, some with arms crossed, underlining the staged spectacle. Technically, the image recalls Microsoft’s 2010 marketing stunt that declared the iPhone “dead,” a move that now exemplifies flawed market forecasting and the eventual failure of Windows Phone in the fiercely competitive mobile OS arena. For developers, it’s a humorous reminder of corporate hubris, shifting platform dominance, and the importance of realistic product validation

Common Tags

Microsoft Apple TechHistory Corporate TechIndustryHumor TechHumor DeveloperHumor MobileDevelopment

Comments

Anonymous ★ Top Pick Parading a coffin for the iPhone before hitting 1% market share was the product-marketing equivalent of calling GC.Collect() before you’ve even allocated any objects

Anonymous ★ Top Pick

Parading a coffin for the iPhone before hitting 1% market share was the product-marketing equivalent of calling GC.Collect() before you’ve even allocated any objects
Anonymous

The same team that organized this funeral later got promoted to Azure naming conventions - which explains why we now have "Microsoft Azure Active Directory Domain Services for Windows Server Active Directory."
Anonymous

Microsoft shipped the funeral before the product had users - the only time their release process was truly ahead of schedule
Anonymous

Nothing says 'we're confident in our product' quite like spending resources on theatrical funerals for competitors. Microsoft's 2010 iPhone funeral is the enterprise equivalent of writing 'TODO: delete this when React is dead' in your Angular codebase - a bold prediction that becomes a permanent monument to hubris. The real irony? They were essentially conducting a funeral for their own mobile platform's future market share. It's the tech industry's perfect example of premature optimization of your victory speech, when you should have been optimizing your actual product-market fit. At least they gave us a masterclass in what NOT to do when launching a platform that would eventually need iOS and Android apps to stay relevant
Anonymous

Launching Windows Phone 7 and holding a funeral for the iPhone was a great reminder that you can’t out‑ceremony network effects; if your SDK is Silverlight/XNA and your store has zero apps, you’ve scheduled the blameless postmortem during the launch parade
Anonymous

WP7 launch: Microsoft buries iPhone in hype, only to get buried by ecosystem reality
Anonymous

They shipped the hearse before the SDK - you can’t out‑market App Store network effects; the rollback job was named 'Windows Phone EOL'
@zherud 4y

That's what happens when u are bullshiting someone. It eventually comes back to you.
1. @RuslanDukhnovskiy 4y
  
  Truth
2. @Roman_Millen 4y
  
  …or not, if you're Facebook.
  
  @Agent1378 4y
  
  Just wait and see
  
  @Stepan_Poznyak 4y
  
  Nothing is eternal
  
  @sylfn 4y
  
  except Putin
  
  @Stepan_Poznyak 4y
  
  Of course
3. @beton_kruglosu_totchno 4y
  
  Not shitting on someone prematurely is optimal.
dev_meme 4y

Lol