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Did the Windows Phone 7 Bomb In the US?
Thorfinn.au writes "Microsoft's new smartphone platform is off to what could be considered a slower start than expected in North America. That's according to The Street, which has released a report saying that the company sold some 40,000 units on its first day on the market.
Early sales numbers from other phone platform launches include Apple's estimated 500,000 iPhones being snatched up during its launch weekend in 2007, and a million and a half G1 Android phones being bought up by T-Mobile subscribers in the phone's first six months." Do you know anyone with one of these phones? Me either.
While I agree it's not as good as Microsoft probably hoped for, I'd like to point out that comparing it's sales to the iPhone (who was, for all intents and purposes, the first of its kind to go critical) and Android (the first solid competitor to the first smartphone to really go critical) isn't exactly fair.
If anything, I'd say that 40,000 for the first day in an already crowded market isn't bad. Not great, but not bad.
Living With a Nerd
At this moment, declaring Windows Phone 7 a flop is just FUD.
You are assuming that WP8 will magically be a success, with, as you say, "25% of the market". What are the reasons to think that? It's not like WP7 is the first or second of Microsoft's forays into phones -- just look at the aptly named WinCE or the recent Microsoft Kin flop.
The creatures outside looked from Alt-Right to Antifa; but already it was impossible to say which was which.
Another fabulous slashdot article summary - comparing the sales on the first day of the WP7 phone with 6 months of sales for the G1? Seriously? I'm no Microsoft fanboy (I've got a G1 sitting on my desk 8 inches from me right now), but c'mon. It would be much more interesting to know how many G1's were sold the first day, the first week, and the first month, and compare that to WP7.
Yes really hardly surprising, and I was hoping for it, not because I wish Microsoft evil, but after years of dreadful ies on the desktop at least in the emerging mobile sektor webkit and its html5 implementation has become more or less the current defacto standard, so people finally can settle for a decent webapp programming experience. And then wham 3 years late Microsoft comes with its newest version of the os and tries to shove IE7 down the web developers throats. I have yet to meet a single web developer who was excited about the browser in WinMobile 7.
If Microsoft had gotten its way then we would have had ie6 all over again in the mobile sector, where a significant portion had a browser which had the latest standards in and stubborn Microsoft users wanted to see the latest whizbang features on their rotten browser without even thinking about installing an alternative. We have been there the last 10 years, and I really do not want history to repeat itself!
Say what you will about Microsoft but I don't think they actually had expectations of the things flying off the shelf in the first few days. They know they're re-entering a brutal market with a lot of very good products and very strong competitors.
I love the comparison of First day :: Launch Weekend :: First 6 Months
Like anyone can even know that
It depends, what is the long game? US companies have the unhealthy opinion of "What do you do for me next quarter?", but if the strategy is "Where do I want to be in 15 years?" (Europe) or "Where do I want to be in 50 years?" (Asia), then those losses are short term. And if you think the future is going to be some kind of media appliance over the next 10 - 15 years, yeah, you've lost a bunch of money on the first two generations, but the experience they've gained for the next 5 generations is invaluable.
I recently bought a 360. I used to play at my friends house, but as we've gotten older and they've gotten married/had kids or moved elsewhere...
Why did I buy a 360 over a Wii or PS3? Because that's what my friends had. Most of the people I know who bought Wii's seemed to have lost interest in the machines. Most use it more to stream Netflix than play games these days. And very few of my friends had a PS3 and most who did also had a 360.
Now I know those numbers don't hold up on a global scale. Xbox has not been that popular outside of the US.
"The problem with socialism is eventually you run out of other people's money" - Thatcher.
You better bring something that no one else has.
Exactly. You can't release a new phone that lacks device encryption for secure Exchange connections, static IP for WiFi, multitasking, cut and paste, and Flash support in the current market. Two or three years ago? Sure. But not now.
The thing is, they're comparing 1 day of W7 phones to 2 days of iPhone sales, and to 180 days of android sales.
Normalised:
W7: 40k
iPhone: 300k
Android: 8k
Of course, I'm not suggesting that the distribution will actually be even, but this is *way* closer to the numbers than comparing 1 days sales to 6 months of sales.
Does everybody have amnesia? Microsoft has been making smartphones for a long time now. Calling this a version one product would be like calling Vista a version 1 product. It's significantly different from it's ancestors, but it has ancestors. I would hope they learned something along the way.
all you need is a dedicated user base that can you can grow. Microsoft is doing the right thing here, they've got the money to play a long game.
What dedicated user base? Remember the past user base for Windows Mobile was primarily business users. WP7 is not backwards compatible and WM6 was hardly loved by its users. For business users like me, I was forced to get WM6 by the company, and I hated it. With WP7 focused on the consumer market and missing many enterprise features, it is highly unlikely that our company would recommend much less purchase WP7 phones at the moment. New business users might as well get a BlackBerry as it seems to be the only purely business smart phone left. iPhone and Android are both adding enterprise features with each release so at the moment, they are more likely to be adopted by businesses than WP7.
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
I bet that particular "feature" can be chalked up the the general craptitude of the .NET Compact Framework they've chosen to ship with. It probably uses too much memory, deadlocks, can't relinquish devices or otherwise does nasty things which assume only one running instance.
All the 1st party apps are native, so they're not affected. 3rd party apps are expected to use the runtime so they are. Assuming the APIs that apps run against define a sensible life cycle I don't see any reason they couldn't fix it.
But it does highlight how immature Windows Phone 7 is despite its glossy UI. Other red flags are things like it's inability to deal with removable storage as well as various things that were in 6.5 but not 7. Clearly these things can be (re)implemented but until they are, I would advise anyone thinking of picking up one of these phones to run a mile.
I've seen the ads, but in classic Microsoft fashion they're marketing the operating system with little to no emphasis on what phone you'd buy to get it or what carriers' retail stores will stock it. Say what you want about Apple, but no one was ever confused about what an iPhone was or where to get one.
There's a perfect xkcd for my sig but I'm too lazy to look it up. sudo someone go find it.