

Windows Phones Down 38% Since '7' Launch - pulsewave
http://www.informationweek.com/news/windows/microsoft_news/231300314

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mdda
What always boggles my mind when I read this kind of article on an
'enterprisy' site is the comments. Many of them are extremely quick to defend
Microsoft in the face of what they consider biased reporting. And J.Q.Public
promises that MS will fix any problem mentioned. And that MS will come to
dominate the field as soon as they chose to 'really turn on the pressure'.

Personally, I can understand Apple fan-people (after all, it is kind of
magical). And Linux fan-people (after all, the whole Freedom thing is kind of
magical).

But defending Microsoft (or Blackberry, to take another example)? To me, it
seems like being a huge fan of Gap fashion (sorry, for the comparison, Gap).
Or Con-Ed.

~~~
nextparadigms
When I saw the Simon Sinek video on leadership
(<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qp0HIF3SfI4>), it quickly clicked with me
that the supporters of Apple are also people who above all want a quality
product, that has beautiful design and is easy to use.

Also, people who support Google believe in what Google believes - freedom,
openness, personalization, and not getting overcharged and arm and a leg for
the service they provide.

But when I thought of Microsoft, I couldn't get neither a quick answer, nor a
good one. What are Microsoft's beliefs? What is their mantra? Why do they
exist? I couldn't really come up with an answer - except "making money". 15
years ago Microsoft's mantra was about putting a computer on every desk.
They've pretty much accomplished that mission. But Microsoft doesn't inspire
that in me right now - what they inspire and makes me think about them is that
above else, they want to make money.

Every company wants to make money, but we "believe" in the companies we love
for different reasons, not because they want to make money. We love the
companies that share our beliefs. What exactly are Microsoft's beliefs
nowadays? To kill Google? Is that what makes whatever fans they have left to
still love them?

I don't think that's enough to win over a larger crowd in the future, as they
start losing their monopoly on "computing machines", and all the negative
sentiment they are gathering with the patents right now, will come back to
haunt them later and create a _negative_ halo around all their products.
They're forgetting "Android users" could very well be customers of other
products of theirs.

~~~
taway990
>Also, people who support Google believe in what Google believes - freedom,
openness, personalization, and not getting overcharged and arm and a leg for
the service they provide.

Openness, unless of course you are talking about the one thing that brings
them money, that is surprisingly not open...I am sure it is just a
coincidence...ohhh, no wait, it is for the 'good' of the end user, I forgot.
Luckily for them it happens to also work out perfectly since it is their
dominant source of income.

People's blind belief that Google's motivation is solely the good of the world
is amazing, especially for people that claim they are objective.

~~~
sorbus
You want Google to open source their advertising framework?

~~~
cooldeal
I don't know if you were being facetious but I think he meant the search
engine. Forget the search engine, how about their flavor of Linux that they
made all their tens of billions off of? Nope, that's closed too and the
improvements aren't available to Linux developers.

If Linux were licensed under the Affero GPL instead of theplain GPL, Google
would be infringing.

~~~
rbanffy
> that's closed too and the improvements aren't available to Linux developers.

Are you sure those are improvements most people would want to have? Google has
a remarkably narrow set of requirements for their servers and it seems more
likely than not that if they made changes to their kernels, they would not be
regarded as improvements by anyone with slightly different hardware.

------
smilliken
It must be disheartening to be _losing_ market share after launching WP7. That
said, these numbers are a bit deceiving for two reasons:

1) WP7 + Windows Mobile is probably still growing in absolute numbers, but
just being outpaced by Android and iOS growth

2) These numbers only represent consumer devices, not business; from the
comScore report: "Data on mobile phone usage refers to a respondent’s primary
mobile phone and does not include data related to a respondent’s secondary
device.". In particular, many people have iPhone's for personal use and a
BlackBerry/Windows phone for business use.

edit: formatting

~~~
azakai
> WP7 + Windows Mobile is probably still growing in absolute numbers, but just
> being outpaced by Android and iOS growth

My guess is that it is shrinking, not growing.

The only way to be sure would be to see sales numbers from Microsoft. The fact
that Microsoft hides those numbers is telling.

~~~
sorbus
> The only way to be sure would be to see sales numbers from Microsoft. The
> fact that Microsoft hides those numbers is telling.

Or we could look at the size of the market at times when we know the
percentage of the market they have, which gives us absolute numbers, and then
graph those over time.

~~~
azakai
Good point, here are some market share % along with absolute numbers:

[http://www.appleinsider.com/articles/11/08/11/apples_ios_and...](http://www.appleinsider.com/articles/11/08/11/apples_ios_and_google_android_swell_to_62_percent_of_smartphone_market.html)

Calculating from that, Microsoft has plummeted from 3,041M units to 1,724M
units. In other words, Microsoft is now shipping almost __half __the number of
phones it was shipping last year.

That's much worse than I had imagined.

Another datapoint, Bada has doubled in marketshare and now exceeds that of
Microsoft.

------
csomar
This is not quite accurate since the smartphone market is growing... fast.
This means that Microsoft sales might have grown, but they still don't get up
to the smartphone market growth. Android and iPhone began from 0% market-share
and they climbed quick. There is room for another Operating System and may be
more. Microsoft brings up something different. It's not as open as Android and
not so closed like Apple (At least, you choose the device).

It's too early to judge. Also Microsoft has lots of cash to advertise its'
smartphone platform. That's something that not all of the competitors have.

~~~
azakai
Microsoft has a hard road ahead. HP has arguably better software with WebOS,
plus bucketloads of cash. And I wouldn't count RIM out either, even though
they are losing market share and don't have any technological advantage.

------
wrl
I'm still keeping my fingers crossed that Nokia isn't betting the whole farm
on WP7. They managed to drum up loads of interest in Meego with the N9 and I
hope it's not the end of the line.

------
wallflower
I love the Metro UI, but the only time I have seen it was when a MSFT employee
demoed it.

Outside of TV commercials, I have not seen a single WP7 phone in the wild.

Hopefully Nokia can make WP7 sexy and mainstream.

~~~
emehrkay
It is very smooth. I remember a lot of touches having feedback through small
vibrations. If it weren't for the browser, Id recommend it to people.

------
protomyth
I do think WP7 would have had a better chance if it was also their tablet OS.

~~~
halo
You can bet that Microsoft's plan is to merge Windows Phone and Windows into a
single codebase.

~~~
protomyth
That will be too little too late and too bloated. They needed the focus of WP7
in tablets and not the legacy.

~~~
halo
From what I believe, Windows 8 and Windows Phone 8 will be the same OS which
runs the exact same apps, only with different UIs for different screen
sizes/aspect ratios. Branding then becomes irrelevant: they are literally the
exact same OS. No different to iOS for the iPhone and iPad, or Android running
on phones and tablets.

It doesn't have to mean bloat either, assuming Windows sufficiently is
modular. Just don't include or load the Win32 subsystem. The ARM version
doesn't have backwards compatibility anyway.

Windows 8 should be out within the year, and given that it's an extension of
the PC market it shouldn't be too late.

If Microsoft can pull it off successfully, it should hugely improve their
mobile prospects by allowing them to use their dominance of the desktop.
Buying an application once and having it work on your phone, tablet and
desktop (and potentially console) is an incredibly compelling selling point
that would overcome WP7's current marketshare problem. It would also make it
much easier for Microsoft to introduce features: do it once, and get it on
every platforms for free. It's a very forward-looking idea.

~~~
contextfree
There has been no confirmation that W8 and WP8 will be the same OS, and in
fact the rumors from quasi-reputable sources have been to the contrary: W8 and
WP8 development are currently proceeding separately and WP8 is still CE-based;
they want to eventually merge the kernels but that is planned for further out,
Windows 9. (though I'd imagine whatever plans they have for that far ahead are
tentative and probably open to heavy revision once they get around to actually
working on

(a more realistic and interesting possibility though is that the new Windows
Runtime/Jupiter framework in W8 will be ported to WP8/CE, which could make it
easy to write (new) apps that work on both. There is some evidence of this in
the leaked W8 builds as they include support for phone dialing.)

~~~
halo
Yeah, I might have accelerated the timeline a bit.

Even so, I think it's clear that they're going in the direction of merging
code-bases, and I'm certain that touch-screen Windows 8 and Windows Phone 8
apps will be cross-platform and be based around the same high-level framework.
It'd be insanity otherwise.

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canistr
The problem is that they haven't updated or made any splashes since the
launch. Yes, the Mango update has been floating around but consumers are
always asking "what have you done for me lately?"

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MichaelGG
If these numbers are for Windows Mobile as a whole, is this attributable to
the old Windows Mobile finally getting tossed by people?

~~~
Duff
It would have to be. The only people using Windows Mobile were masochist
enterprise types who didn't like BlackBerry for whatever reason.

Since WP7 doesn't or didn't support most of the features that matter to
masochist enterprise types, Win Mobile is dying. No CIO or IT Director has the
cojones to keep the users running Treo's and Motorola Q's.

I'm pretty much responsible (at a management level) for an enterprise running
over 5k devices, which we turnover completely every 18-24 months. Frankly, I
don't even know the names of any WP7 phones -- our guys shipped them back to
the carrier when some update bricked them. Maybe we'll look at them again next
year. iPhones are a huge deal and easy to manage. Android isn't quite there
yet, but will be. BlackBerry is BlackBerry... three's company, four (and five)
is a crowd. WP7 and WebOS are the crowd.

