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.

Comments

If You're Late to the Party

[eldavojohn]

You better bring something that no one else has. I'm still looking and waiting for something that WP7 devices are offering that isn't covered by Android and/or iOS. I understand that a hybrid is valuable when Android and iOS offer either extreme but ... can someone tell me what WP7 does that makes it unique? What are its selling points? Because from what I've read, there are no unique aspects to it.

It's XBox all over again. They'll lose several billion on WP7 and write it off. WP8 will come out and after three years of shoving the platform down people's throats, they'll be a hard won 25% of the market. Don't get me wrong, I own an XBox 360 but how many years of mistakes did it take for them and how much did they lose on the original to come to that piece of market share?

Why flush money down a losing venture until it starts to see a return? Because they can. And one of the many faults of capitalism is that those with a ton of money can do the stupidest shit and still come out okay.

Re:If You're Late to the Party

[Jugalator]

You better bring something that no one else has.

Yup... and especially not LESS.

WP7 doesn't do multitasking with third party apps (only Microsoft's own apps has this advantage, go figure...), and doesn't even support encrypted Exchange connections. Yes, yes, Microsoft wrote Exchange, and even Windows Mobile 6.5 supported this! This will effectively shut out many enterprise users from using this phone if their servers reject unencrypted connections (and rightly so, in my opinion).

It's funny when iPhone has support for encrypted Exchange connections in built-in software on both OS X (Mail) and iOS, and MS in neither Windows 7, nor Windows Phone 7. No, not even Windows Live Mail supports true Exchange connections -- it has to be set up to serve as an IMAP server. And Exchange is a behemoth in the enterprise market.

Go go Ballmer with your strategic decisions.

Or maybe it's their shareholders that need to go "strategic" on Ballmer...

Re:While I agree it's not as good as...

[jittles]

I think it's not fair to make the comparison just because AT&T didn't bother to supply their stores with anything. I have a friend who took the day off work to wait in line and buy one. He had called the store and asked them if he needed to get in early and they told them they had plenty of phones in stock and that he could come in any time and buy one. He got there an hour before the store opened and found out that the AT&T corporate store had 2 phones in stock. That's right. 2. Now maybe that's all the demand they thought they'd get but that store was sold out the second the store opened.

I don't think AT&T has any interest in offering serious competition to the iPhone. That's why all their android phones are pretty crappy compared to T-Mobile, Sprint or Verizon.