
Microsoft Shipped 2 Million Units of Windows Phone 7 Software Last Quarter - azharcs
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2011-01-26/microsoft-says-it-shipped-2-million-windows-phones-last-quarter.html
======
larsberg
I moved from my iPhone (which finally bit the dust) to the LG Quantum. The
nice things:

\- Zune Pass. It's like Netflix for music, but you can carry your queue around
with you even if you're off-signal.

\- I stayed with AT&T, and have significantly fewer dropped calls and better
signal quality than on my last phone.

\- A single start screen with all the apps, auto-updating so you can see
weather and other info without having to launch the app is really fantastic.

\- No iTunes. The phone can just sync over WiFi, and there's no weird
tethering-to-one-machine garbage.

\- The keyboard! It's got two modifier keys (shift and FN), and the keys are
large enough that I can type pretty quickly. I need to port a mini-emacs and a
terminal window ASAP. It's that usable.

The not-good:

\- The App Market really isn't there. And where there are similar apps, the
ports smell of outsourced development, as many of them (Yelp and Kindle, I'm
looking at you!) crash and/or just don't have a very smooth feel.

\- Location services seems to have a lot of trouble figuring out where I am to
anything smaller than a zip code.

\- I'm not on Facebook or XBox Live, so I feel like some of the social
integration is a bunch of work they did that I just miss out on. Fortunately,
I could just remove those apps from the front screen.

\- Trying to browse the Metro UI media app is a real pain. If I'm listening to
a song, do I use the back button or swipe in a direction? Well, it depends on
how I _got_ to the Now Playing screen, and there are a few cases where I've
been just stuck and had to close and re-open the app so that navigation would
reset and I could get back to a artists list.

~~~
Splines
On Android the back button also has problems. It's definitely noticeable when
the developer hasn't gotten it right. I recently tried out K9 (an alternative
mail client), and you can end up navigating in circles (which causes
application state confusion - is the state of the program global, so if I
press back enough times to end up on the same menu, it's updated, or did I
just travel back in time?).

------
terhechte
It's easy to calculate. They claimed to have shipped 1.5Mio to carriers on the
21th of December. Now they claim it's 2 Mio. I'd expect that the carriers only
order new phones after the old ones have been sold, so one can wager that the
carriers sold around 500.000 phones since december the 21th.

So that's around 500.000 / 37. That makes it around 13.000 activations a day.

So given that the device was introduced beginning of November, it has been on
the market for 2month and a couple of days. So then we have 13.000 * 85days =
around 1.1 mio devices sold. The rest is waiting on shelves for eager
customers. Doesn't sound too good.

~~~
kenjackson
Although today WP7 has the least global reach of any of the major smartphones.
Android is on all carriers. iPhone is on fewer carriers in the US, but more
worldwide, and Blackberry is everywhere.

W/o Verizon and Sprint they'll continue to struggle. And frankly they should
have made sure they were on Verizon before iPhone. A US CDMA launch would have
likely been better than a global GSM launch.

And the phone still has many holes in it. It looks like a great foundation,
but they need to fix the holes a LOT faster than they've been doing.

Not fixing the holes is frankly inexcusable. And IMO probably the best
indication that MS is culturally broken. I get having trouble rev'ing Office
or Windows -- those have huge existing user bases (deeply entrenched inthe
enterprise) so you have to be extremely careful and move with great
deliberation. With phones they have no legacy, no current customers, aren't in
the enterprise at all, are playing catch up, and have huge holes. If this
isn't a time when you rev hard and fast, I'm not sure when it is. And they
have a great model in Chrome of a team that can do it with high quality.

MS not being agile with WP7 would worry me more than threats to Office and
Windows, because it indicates an inability to react.

------
sadiq
It seems that this is licenses sold rather than activations.

I'd be interested in knowing their total activations for the quarter though
it's certainly lower.

Doesn't compare well with the 300,000 activations/day Google claim to be
doing.

~~~
cryptoz
Yeah, 2 million shipments over 3 months is around 33,000 a day, which is only
10% (or less, given Android's accelerating growth) of the activations that
Google sees. And of course, not all those shipments are activations.

I wonder if they're not telling us about the activation numbers out because
they're too low? Why else hide that information that every other company is
bragging about? Not a quarter goes by where Apple and Google don't _both_
release their activation numbers.

~~~
oiuytghyujki
Because most of these are bundle deals to HW makers.

Samsung buys 10M OEM licenses for Windows7 for netbooks and MS throws in 1M
Win7 phone licenses for free to make it's numbers look good.

It's like newspapers handing out free copies to hotels to boost their
circulation figures.

~~~
rbanffy
> It's like newspapers handing out free copies to hotels to boost their
> circulation figures.

With the important distinction people actually read those newspapers.

~~~
podperson
Um -- have you seen what happens to the newspapers given away in hotels?

~~~
rbanffy
Have you seen what happens to WP7 licenses that are not used in actual phones?

Me neither.

------
seshagiric
My own like/ dislike list:

Likes: 1\. Games - need for speed and others are very cool. 2\. facebook
integration just works. When reading an email it is nice to see the sender's
photo (pulled from FB if he is in FB friend's list). 3\. Amazon Kindle reader
- the list of free books helps. 4\. Voice search in Bing (needs no training)
5\. Tiles for different apps looks cool and easy to use. 6\. Boots up in less
than 30 seconds. 7\. Zune manages podcasts quite good - this is a good way to
use the office transit time 8\. Market place is actually decent.

Dislike: 1\. No serious API yet, for example no access to camera or compass.
2\. battery life on HTC Mozart is 1 day after fairly good amount of talk time
+ wifi + GPS + gaming. This is actually not a problem because it runs for
atleast one day - but it could have been better.

------
xutopia
Both people I know who got one recently bought it because it came with a free
XBox 360 as part of the plan. In both cases it was their first "smartphone"
and one of them explained how confused he was by the whole thing.

------
hop
At $8-$15 per license they are charging, thats $16-$30M. They still have some
ground to make up on the $1B or so dropped on the Kin. Does not seem like this
can ever be a profitable business for them - especially compared to the
$149-$499 they get per Office license.

~~~
chollida1
> They still have some ground to make up on the $1B or so dropped on the Kin.

Did they really spend $1B on the Kin? Do you have a breakdown on what they
spent that much money on?

~~~
hop
$500M spent to buy Danger in 2008 plus assumption of debt and the $260M write
down they later took on discontinuing the Kin in 2008. So probably around
$.75B - that is still a ton of phone licenses they would need to sell to
recoup.

And that isn't even taking into account the R%D spent on the Windows 7 phone,
which they are said to spend $400M on marketing for.

If Apple was only selling OS licenses for the 14M iPhone4's it shipped at MS's
price, they would only have made $112M-210M in revenue.

[http://gorumors.com/business/microsoft-kin-revenue-
loss/6154...](http://gorumors.com/business/microsoft-kin-revenue-loss/61542)
[http://techcrunch.com/2010/08/26/microsoft-half-billion-
doll...](http://techcrunch.com/2010/08/26/microsoft-half-billion-dollars-
windows-phone-7/)

------
cdr
I wonder if that number includes giveaways? I recall they gave away approx
100K phones to Microsoft employees alone.

~~~
nickbarnwell
IIRC, it was actually an option to purchase a WP7 phone and get a full refund
from the company. Essentially the same thing, but there are plenty of people
who haven't exercised the option and are sticking with WM6.x or other devices
for the time being.

Edit: The giveaway was also different between each branch of MS, EU was
handled differently than the US.

~~~
smilliken
I think it was even worse- I think if they signed a 2 year contract with a
carrier, they got a refund on the subsidized price of the phone (which is
usually a trivial amount).

------
ReadyNSet
I've one :) got because of BOGO deal. Samsung Focus's screen is awesome the
SuperAMOLED really shows anyone who sees it really likes the screen and that
includes iPhone and Nexus owners and others.

Marketplace really is not there, the apps are junk and even the marketplace
app itself is slow to load on cellular connections and it really shows. the
search is pathetic it seems they intentionally show you the songs along with
apps even if all I want is apps

MS needs to update the OS and they need to do it fast and frequently otherwise
in next six months to year they'll be out of this game forever

~~~
jf
> MS needs to update the OS and they need to do it fast and frequently
> otherwise in next six months to year they'll be out of this game forever

There's an OS update on the way :)

------
nigelsampson
I have the HTC Trophy from Vodafone here in New Zealand, I really enjoy the
UI, for some reason it really clicks with me compared some the other
smartphones.

As a developer my biggest gripe is the limited access to some of the phone
features, the largest one being the limited API for Live Tiles which clearly
is one of the major selling points for the WP7.

------
misterbwong
Good for them.

Yes, we can speculate on whether this is marketing FUD or real numbers but the
bottom line is that MS made a good product that is helping to innovate the
mobile space by increasing competition.

------
bowmande
Microsoft can't build the kind of developer community that Google and Apple
have. The interface is smooth, and the Zune Pass is great, but there has to be
more.

~~~
jerhinesmith
_Can't build_? Why not? Developers in general love their tools (Visual
Studio), the language has a huge user base (C#), and they're leveraging a
rapidly maturing framework (Silverlight).

If anything, when it comes to getting developer mindshare, it seems like
Microsoft has a huge leg up.

~~~
bowmande
Microsoft is the development platform of choice for big business. The hottest
startup to use their stack in recent memory is StackOverflow. Generally
speaking hackers choose not to use Microsoft's platform when they have a
choice. Personally I use c# at my day job, but I barely considered building
something for the WP7, and am instead working on iPhone and Android.

------
warmfuzzykitten
Wow, that's a big warehouse full!

