It may be fair to criticize HTC but one factor should be considered: HTC was compelled by carriers to produce multiple versions of each generation of its phones. Particularly as a relative newcomer to dealing with carriers, its leverage was not strong. That does not the whole tribe of products but ...
HTC started out designing products. They just didn't have the distribution nor the brand, so they sold their products to Western OEMs. A more similar comparison would be Huawei, which pioneers a lot of technology, yet was selling rebranded phones until recently.
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I'm going to resist the joke here. Imagine one of your own.
I was teeing it up for someone, anyone.
In recent years HTC has made 33 different android phones and 17 Windows Phone models.
That's 50 different phones since 2009 or so.
That is just a terrible business model from an R&D expense perspective and logistics perspective.
It's just not sustainable long term, especially when you consider many of those phones will be junk by design.
...and ANOTHER four phone later this month. Nothing like competing against yourself, and not getting any advantage of scale in manufacturing.
They were like Foxconn today, not innovative
HTC started out designing products. They just didn't have the distribution nor the brand, so they sold their products to Western OEMs. A more similar comparison would be Huawei, which pioneers a lot of technology, yet was selling rebranded phones until recently.