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Windows Phones Getting Buried At Carriers' Stores
tripleevenfall sends in a PCMag story about how Microsoft's problems in driving Windows Phone 7 adoption stem in part from how the phones are represented to customers in carriers' stores. Quoting:
"At AT&T, the salesperson was a recent iPhone to Android convert. She was enthusiastic about WP7 devices, saying that Netflix was on WP7 and not available on her Android, and looked embarrassed when she walked me over to AT&T's unkempt WP7 display shelf. ... At a Verizon reseller kiosk, a salesman clearly tried to deter me from buying a WP7 device altogether. Not only did not he appear to know the fundamental difference between Windows Mobile and WP7, his kiosk didn't even offer WP7 devices and said you'd only find WP7 demo products at a few of Verizon's big retail stores. 'Honestly, only 1 out of 500 customers comes in here asking for a Windows phone,' he said. 'Verizon won't roll them out to kiosks until it performs better on the market.'"
'Verizon won't roll them out to kiosks until it performs better on the market. . .'
. . . and it won't perform better on the market until agents have it in their hands to offer customers. Catch-22 anyone?
The Christian Right is Neither (Christian nor right). See: Matthew 23, Matthew 25, Ezekiel 16:48-50
Thanks for letting us know?
I'm sure they were just trying to make us aware that it's going to be hard for Win Phone 7 to trounce the iPhone by 2015 if the carriers keep hiding it under the rotting corpse.
IT'S A CONSPIRACY!
These are the best devices in the entire Youniverse. They have the look and functionality of Tandy Deskmate, paired with the savvy charisma that you've come to associate with Ballmer!
If Verizon didn't keep these things DOWN, you would be able to keep them UP!
"Flyin' in just a sweet place,
Never been known to fail..."
the problem is that windows mobile phones sucked THAT bad. Like Vogon poetry bad.
It's foolish to base any of your decisions on what retail cell salesmen say or do anyway. I've never been outright lied to as often as I have by someone trying to sign me up for a cell phone plan.
Well, except for someone trying to sell me a TV or laptop at BestBuy. They like to bend the truth and hide things, too.
If Caveat Emptor ever applies in life, it sure as hell does when it comes to electronic devices in a retail setting...
Sprint did the exact same thing with WebOS. Granted, the hardware was nothing to write home about, but the operating system is great! The WebOS phones were always stuck in the back corner of the store, though.
"Tell me doctor, with all of your defenses, are there any provisions for an attack by killer bees?"
MS can easily fix the chicken/egg scenario.
1: Put out a new version of the ActiveSync protocol which is only licensed to the iPhone and WP7 devices.
2: Make it the the default protocol in the next Exchange version. Perhaps the only protocol, and move legacy ActiveSync (as well as IMAP and POP) to an additional charge product similar to BES.
3: Add some security features to the new ActiveSync protocol so it is the only one "blessed" by businesses under the guise of SOX, HIPAA, etc. (even when in reality, that protocol doesn't matter.)
4: Watch businesses not bother with Android and buy WP7 phones en masse over Blackberries.
5: ????
6: Profit. Exchange is the mail standard, and if a phone doesn't work with ActiveSync, it will not sell past the consumer market.
It's a shame. Microsoft could produce a phone that creates gold from air, and nobody would know about it because everybody hates Microsoft. They seriously have a problem. Nobody wants MS to have control over the mobile phone market.
Apple is doing well. Apple has good branding. Apple is stylish and trendy and slick. It sells well because people feel really good about buying them. Android has a different strategy. It's backed by Google. Google has this air of nerdiness. It's technical. It's clever. It doesn't care what people think and it's *not* Apple.
Where does Windows Mobile fit in here? Windows is not a strong brand. It's clunky and you need it because everyone else uses it. It's also late to market. Why would anyone choose that given the alternatives? It actually looks like there are some nice features on Windows Mobile. It would have to be a *lot* better than my android phone for me to want one though.
FTFA >> "Not only did not he appear to know the fundamental difference between Windows Mobile and WP7..."
He's hardly alone. One problem with MS changing their mobile strategy every five minutes is people have stopped giving a shit.
It's Apple vs. Android for the market share. MS is too late to join the party.
I see Apple iPhone ads almost ever other commercial break. Direct ones from apple, and carrier branded ones.. They are on constantly... I see giant Android signs up in malls.
Where is the MS Windows Phone Marketing?
EA David Gardner -"... but the consumers have proven that actually what they want is fun."
their heavy hand in the desktop/laptop market has angered many many people and the resentment goes a long ways in what people offer and recommend, they don't want what happened in the PC market to happen to the cellphone market too
Politics is Treachery, Religion is Brainwashing
I actually think WP7 will fail much worse than Vista. Vista was a bit sluggish but it run the old applications. WP7 can't, and that will be fatal. All the Windows Mobile users will move to Android where their apps already work. People who already have an Android or iOS device are very unlikely to switch to WP7. All the ISVs will end up on Android and/or iOS because it's easier to port an app to a platform where you can use C/C++ and native code than one where the whole thing needs to be in C# and Silverlight or XNA. Even Angry Birds needs a C physics library. In fact even if Microsoft allow C and native code I doubt the ISVs that used to support Windows Mobile will come back because the platforms already bad market share is dropping quickly.
E.g. Pleco - a Chinese dictionary - moved to iOS and (soon) to Android. They've dropped Windows Mobile and won't ever support WP7. When they dropped Windows Mobile the iOS version was outselling WinMo 10:1. They have core code in C/C++ which they can run on both iOS and Android (also on WinMo). No chance of it working on WP7 without rewriting in C#. And no chance of getting their handwriting and OCR libraries from third parties ported either.
Opera have dropped Windows Mobile and won't support WP7. Once again they have C/C++ code with a few third party libraries in native ARM. It would be almost impossible to port to WP7 and even if they did Microsoft have apparently said they won't allow alternative browsers in their app store.
In a sense WP7 is more like a console than a phone. Worse actually since XBoxes support native code as far as I know. Maybe they'll pick up games from the XBox ecosystem but I don't think that will make up for not having things like Opera and Pleco though. They've apparently offered Adobe the possibility of native code to get Flash ported and possibly will do the same for titles like Angry Birds. Still that's not really enough - Adobe haven't announced a ship date and Roxio, the Angry Birds publisher, have publicly contradicted Microsoft when Microsoft implied they had committed to porting. I.e. handing out native code passes for key applications is not enough to get people to support a platform which is obviously doomed.
Picture Vista with no back compatibility following on from XP which had 1/3 the market share of OSX. Imagine that all the software already worked on iOS. That's the situation WP7 is in - it's actually easier to run the apps you used on Windows Mobile on Android than on WP7. Even the IHVs like HTC prefer Android because it's free to them and there are no limits on things like the Sense UI. WP7 has ridiculous limits on how much value they can add and they need to rewrite all their WinMo software in C# to make it work.
I think the market share will drop rapidly and Microsoft will kill it. Just like Kin and Zune, both of which used the same software.
echo -e 'global _start\n _start:\n mov eax, 2\n int 80h\n jmp _start' > a.asm; nasm a.asm -f elf; ld a.o -o a;
Carriers' should not have Stores you should be able to go a cell phone store and pick the Carrier you want with out the voice and data plan lock-in + insane roaming rates.
Mango addresses probably 90% of the disparity between WP7 and Android. The question is whether Microsoft can get it out on time and with compelling devices.
With WP7 crashing, and Nokia committing to WP7 in a big way, I wonder if WP7 would take Nokia down with it...
Same issue when I was looking for a Palm Pre Plus... So I bought it online. Palm's .. err HPs new phones (right now just the Veer) are likely just as buried. This is a hard market to get into. In fact the one Palm phone I was able to get access to in the store didn't seem to work.
I ended up getting a Palm Pre Plus and really like it and highly recommend it (well actually at this point you should get the Veer or Pre3). It's not all open source but they respect (read donate hardware too) their homebrew community.
http://bryanquigley.com/uncategorized/hppalms-webos
I don't see a reason why we should care that Windows Phones aren't getting "fair" time in the market, they have an unfair enough advantage in other markets. I also would much rather WebOS take off.
Not open as in open source, but they can't lock these things down. I can download .cab files to do anything I want and there's no way they can really stop it. I don't have to go through any store or such nonsense. I'm not sure if WP7 is as open, but i'm hard pressed to let go of my 6.5 phone. It does everything I would want it to - for free.
Do you really think they are sitting on a huge pile of phones? They are not. The phones are in stock (in reasonable quantities, not massive) at their big stores and they aren't selling well there. People are apparently not asking about them very often at kiosks. Why would you take up valuable kiosk space with phones nobody seems to be that interested in.
WP7 phones not selling is really a non issue for carriers. It is only an issue for MS and the manufactures of those phones.
"In America, first you get the sugar, then you get the power, then you get the women..." -H. Simpson
Damned right there is a bias. After getting short shrift on support & software from MS on their mobile platform, going back to WinCE 2.11, I'll never use another WinMo phone again. I'm no Apple fanboy, but thank goodness that Jobs released the iPhone and changed the game, overthrowing the staid incumbents once and for all. I currently have an Evo and love it. I prefer Android, can appreciate the Apple devices, and will never again support MS due to their horrible customer service and support when they supplanted Palm. MS earned the bias against them.
She visited four stores - one from each of the big providers. Had she come to my local AT&T store, she would have seen the giant Windows Mobile display with several working demos, not to mention a sales guy who wouldn't shut up about Xbox Live or Netflix. I'm not saying that WM7 isn't being as hotly promoted as the other platforms, but it would be nice if she were drawing this kind of conclusion from a slightly larger sample set.
Microsoft didn't make a zillion dollars off of consumer Windows licenses. They made their fortune off of OEM licenses coupled to all those Acers and Dells and Packard Bells rolling out to your neighborhood computer store. Redmond used the clout it had with the manufacturers to make sure that IBM never was able to cut substantial OEM deals of its own, which was what the first anti-trust investigation in the early 1990s was about.
IBM certainly made some errors with Warp, but the fact was that Microsoft used its monopoly position as the major supplier of operating systems to PC compatibles in the late 1980s and early 1990s to make sure that IBM (or anyone else, remember Dr. DOS) would not have their OS sitting on the PC that you or your Aunt Maud or your boss bought.
I've bought precisely one shrinkwrapped operating system off the shelf in my entire life, and that was OS/2 Warp 3. Every other computer I've bought has come with one version or another of Windows on it. I'll wager that shrinkwrapped retail Windows licenses have never made up more than a fraction of consumer Windows sales for Microsoft.
It's a different situation in the corporate world, where volume licensing is king, but still, I know a lot of companies that buy the OEM versions of Windows when they purchase new workstations even there.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
The biggest issue is that the advertisments for WP7 are stressing functionality and operability, when the majority of consumers just want "cool". If they advertised this based on the cool apps and games like Apple and Google are, and oh by the way it runs your important stuff too, then they may have some people walking into stores asking for it.
Everyone seems to be missing the fact that Microsoft is Buying Skype. Bundle Skype with an internet enabled portable device and you can cut the phone carriers out quite significantly. Free texting, calls between Windows devices internationally.
I could think of more but I wouldn't be surprised. Then again, Our windows 7 machines have started getting calls from "windows help". hrm...
- Dan.
~ People that think they are better than anyone else for any reason are the cause of all the strife in the world.
"What's in it for them?"
Profit.
Smart phones eat bandwidth, phone carriers sell bandwidth.