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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.
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.
My work here is dung.
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.
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.
Neither?
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.
Apparently most stores only got 10 or so units and they sold out immediately. Pretty hard to sell more units of something if you don't have the stock.
Build a man a fire and he'll be warm for an hour. Set him on fire and he'll be warm for the rest of his life.
Maybe its due to the fact that theres handset shortages everywhere and partner staff were not trained correctly, their canadian launch was abysmal, i have not seen any adds on tv for it at all here in canada, theres no advertising in their launch partner stores like telus, bell and rogers, on launch day the only store that had anything in ontario was telus flagship store in toronto and they only had the htc surround which almost no one likes, i called several telus stores in london ontario where i am, and most dident know when they were getting them, they received shipment on the second day of launch but
so far were on the 4th day and the lg optimus 7 is nowhere to be found, acording to posts on the net the situation is the same at bell and rogers with staff either not knowing what windows phone 7 is or not very interested in selling it, so it sounds like ms at least in canada is not pushing its launch partners to get any displays out or doing a very good job in getting interest going, but hey just last night alone i saw 5 kinect adds in one hour, that speaks where their priorities lie.
I have an N900, run GNU/Linux at both home and work and will probably by an HTC Android phone sooner than later. Nonetheless the UI on the Windows Phone 7 looks pretty lovely to me. I think MS has done a fine job.
The question these days of course is not what the phone can do OOTB, but what you can install on it later. AFAIK there isn't much of an 'app ecosystem' for the platform. They're also charging device manufacturers a license fee to ship with the OS, which isn't smart in a world rapidly flowing with Android phones. I wouldn't ring the death bell just yet though - it seems the market's changing pretty fast with the iPhone losing it's fashionable appeal here in the EU now that road-workers, plumbers and unemployed single fathers have the things.
Market differentiation allows for consumer individuation - something Apple's aesthetic homogeneity, doesn't offer. Think Similar (TM).
I love the comparison of First day :: Launch Weekend :: First 6 Months
Like anyone can even know that
If I could get one of these in a PDA-like form instead of phone-like, for under $300, I'd get one, if for no other reason than compatibility testing, development, and the XBox Live integration.
But I am not going to replace my phone at this time.
And that's a real key point to remember, there. Unlike many consumer electronic devices, there are huge barriers to getting a new phone as soon as it comes on the market. Contracts to not all expire at the same time. Check for sales numbers on the 2-year anniversary of the release of previous popular phones (like the iPhone 3Gs for example), and check for sales numbers after a full year of peoples' contracts expiring, and then we'll talk.
Myself, I have no idea if WP7 will succeed, but I think it's got a shot, especially if they take certain actions that they haven't taken yet (eg. extend the "indy marketplace" concept from the XBox to WP7, and STOP PUSHING ZUNE BRANDING SO HARD).
I arrived at AT&T 10 minutes after they opened and they were sold out the 4 phones they had. I was the first person to get on the waiting list. There were 5 people behind me waiting to get on the list. They did receive one more phone that day and I got it. I suspect the demand was higher that day than the available inventory. As for the phone, I love it. Showed it to my wife and kids (14 & 16). The kids raved about it, and my wife (not a technology nerd) was surprised she like it so much versus her iPhone (3G). The UI is very slick, usable and responsive. This is not your typical Microsoft version 1 product. It feels a lot more like it came from a first class consumer electronics company than a business software company.
The only thing I want to know is: Does Windows 7 Mobile allows me to squirt my pals?
Ubuntu is an African word meaning 'I can't configure Debian'
Thing is, there are still companies that are as near as dammit 100% Microsoft shops (or at least are for anything that matters) - though they're becoming a lot thinner on the ground than they were five years ago.
There are also quite a few companies that *think* they're 100% Microsoft shops. (These are the companies where technology isn't core to their business, and the management think that if they're running Windows on their desktop PC, everything else must be Windows as well - after all, you can't get a computer from IBM to talk to one from Fujitsu now[1], can you?). Well and good if you're selling your phone to management at such companies.
But I don't think that's what Microsoft aim to do. The iPhone was probably the first smartphone with real consumer appeal, and if you walk into any UK phone store today you'll see that 80% of the phones they're really pushing are, to a greater or lesser extent, smartphones. Plain old mobile phones without all the smart functionality are being pushed almost exclusively onto Pay as you Go customers and those on a very low budget - two years from now, I reckon a non-smartphone will be as easy to find on the high street as a non-cameraphone is today. My guess is that Microsoft want a piece of that market.
[1] Note for younger /.'ers : Way back in the mists of time, interoperability between computer systems was almost unheard of. You bought the computer from Company X, who also sold you a bunch of other peripherals which connected using proprietary interfaces. Even if you could somehow hook the tape drive from one manufacturer's computer up to another, you'd likely have a hell of a job getting useful data out of it. If you had any sort of networking, it also was proprietary. Standards? What are they?
naming your phone OS after an OS that people use only because they have to (yeah, I know Win 7 is better than Vista, but what isn't).
Observe that even though Mac OS X has a better image than Windows nobody calls iPhone OS X or even iPhone iOS in marketing. Sure, Microsoft makes only the OS, but they should have come up with a different name, Google uses "Android" for example, if they used "Linux" their success would probably be different.
"It is our choices, Harry, that show what we truly are, far more than our abilities." -- Prof. Dumbledore
They have a key differentiator: built in theft prevention - nobody wants to touch it
We all have different needs and wants from our devices so to help you understand my angle; I am an occasional business traveler who enjoys being connected to email, can access maps and driving directions, restaurant and business information nearby, read various Office documents, and generally stay in touch. I am also a hobby programmer and enjoy writing little utility apps for my personal use. I am not a heavy app downloader - my iPhone had all of 20 installed apps. I am a gamer but generally enjoy puzzle and strategy games over FPS or other games that demand heavy real-time input. I do not own an XBox (PS3 for me). I do not use Facebook or Twitter in any real capacity. I tried, and I just don't get it. And finally I am a HUGE music lover. I'm the guy that still buys CDs for the artwork and rips them at higher bitrates. I'm always on the lookout for something new. I also rip all of my DVDs (movies and TV) so I can take them on travel and watch them on the plane.
If you picked up on the iPhone comment above your first question might be why I considered defecting? The simple answer is iTunes. I've had many minor glitches and nags with iTunes over the years, however the recent move of my music and movie library to a NAS was so painful it was the last straw for iTunes.
So what's to like about Win7?
Developers! Developers! Developers! Oh, but they can only program in one language - C#. Just rewrite your codebases of hundreds of thousands of lines so you can port your apps to WP7! It'll be a lot of fun! Both iOS and Android support C / C++, and Android had to release a whole separate NDK to allow that. But yet they still released the importance of supporting one of the most prolific languages of all time.
This reminds me of Sony, where they have so many conflicting interests that they can't do anything well. Why can't Sony DVD players play DivX*? Because Sony also makes movies, and DivX is the leading choice for distributing movies over the internet.
So in this case MS has a programming language to push, a Silverlight platform to push, etc, etc. So it's C# only, to the detriment of WP7, in hopes that it will increase the popularity of C#.
*Perhaps they have models that play DivX now? I haven't looked in the last few years.
Better known as 318230.