Windows Phone was never given a chance to pan out. There wasn’t space for Windows Phone to force its way on the scene but they were building a critical mass of loyal users that would have set up Microsoft longterm to successfully exploit the opportunity when it came.

It is wild to me that upper management at Microsoft was too dumb to understand that and just killed their perfectly good apparatus for gaining a foothold on the mobile market.

They are fools and they ultimately threw mud in the face of the small amount of windows phone fans (of which there definitely were loyal fans especially for the great Nokia cameras and extremely focused UI).