

Microsoft: 1.5 million Windows Phone 7 handsets sold in first six weeks - yatsyk
http://www.mobilecrunch.com/2010/12/21/microsoft-1-5-million-windows-phone-7-handsets-sold-in-first-six-weeks/

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olsonjeffery
I'm not against Microsoft as player in this space, per se.. but what worries
me most about the prospect of the rise of WP7 in terms of marketshare is the
simply having to support their [historically] awful browsers.

Blah-blah-let-the-market-drive-innovation, I know. Microsoft could,
potentially, drive innovation in the html5 space with their entry into the
market (especially given the sorta-monoculture around WebKit (a dualopoly-at-
best between Apple and Google)). It's fair to say that, in the late 90s and
early 2000s, MS did drive some innovation in the browser space. And then they
stopped. For like five years.

Anyone with more than a few years experience in the web (especially in the
enterprise space) has had to write enough crufty client code to support
horrible IE6 corner-cases. I just hope history doesn't repeat itself with
WP7's browser.

And say what you want about iOS vs Android, but at least both platforms are
running very similar (WebKit-based) browser technologies. This makes things
like Zepto.js (with a stated "we're only supporting WebKit for now, so quit
asking about gecko" policy) feasible in terms of offering rich mobile
functionality. The appearance of WP7 as a viable contender throws a spanner in
the works, in this regard.

Does anyone have any insight into how good/bad the WP7's browser support is
for a lot of stuff people are doing in the mobile app space (backbone, etc),
compared to existent mobile functionality present in iOS and Android?

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dgallagher
1.5 million sold to carriers and retailers != 1.5 million sold to customers

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stcredzero
My prognostication: Microsoft will get huge market-share, but will do so
largely at the expense of RIM/Blackberry.

RIM could respond by extracting the good parts of the Blackberry
infrastructure and licensing these to companies with Android phones and by
exploiting greater openness on the Windows Phone 7 platform. In essence, RIM
gets out of the device business and transitions into the business mobile
networking infrastructure business using various platforms as a substrate.

