Sam Kaufmann, CEO of Random Salad Games Random Salad Games

Sam Kaufmann is on somewhat of a digital island. His company, Random Salad Games, is the largest ad-supported app developer on Microsoft Windows, which has become an afterthought in the mobile market now dominated by Apple and Google. It's still a nice business for Kaufmann. He says annual revenue is in the seven figures, enough to pay his handful of developers. Random Salad's most popular title is "Simple Solitaire." The company has about 20 other casual games, including "Simple Mahjong," "Hearts Deluxe" and "Dice King," mostly played by people who are bored at work on their PCs or perhaps at home tooling around on their Surface tablets. So when Microsoft announced in a short blog post last month that it was shutting down its service that lets developers make money through ads, nobody was more at risk than Kaufmann. Fortunately, he had a sense based on the performance and quality of the ads, that such a move was coming and had been preparing for it for months. Rather than just letting his nine-year-old business wither away, Kaufmann started building his own software development kit (SDK) that could tap into the same type of programmatic ad networks Microsoft had been using. It let him keep his games populated with money-making banner promotions. He's calling the product Pubfinity and, while it's currently just being used for Random Salad's games, he plans to soon roll it out to other developers.

"My immediate need was to monetize my own apps," said Kaufmann, who's based in Philadelphia. "The ultimate goal is to position Pubfinity as a replacement for the Microsoft SDK going away." In Microsoft's march to a trillion dollar market cap and CEO Satya Nadella's transformation of the company into a cloud powerhouse, not every strategic effort has worked. Microsoft is way behind Amazon and Google in voice-powered computing, for example, and has struggled to cut into Salesforce's massive lead in customer relationship management software, despite spending $27 billion on LinkedIn in 2016. But no failure has been as glaring as mobile, where Microsoft had grand plans for a smartphone operating system as part of the Windows 10 release in 2015. At its launch event for Windows 10 devices in October of that year, Nadella told an audience in New York that "we're building the most productive phone on the planet." Panos Panay, who at the time was vice president of the devices group, described "the power of putting Windows in your pocket."

Opportunity lost

For developers like Kaufmann, who live and breathe Windows, this appeared to be the opportunity to reach a broader audience with their mobile-friendly apps. Random Salad has some titles on Android but doesn't even try to compete on the sprawling iOS marketplace, where millions of developers duke it out for downloads. Kaufmann counts on Microsoft for substantially all of his company's revenue. But despite its hefty investment and marketing push, Microsoft could never crack the Apple-Google duopoly. In January 2019, the company said it would no longer support Windows Mobile and advised customers to switch to an iPhone or Android device.

Panos Panay, Microsoft's chief product officer, holds up the new Surface Duo.