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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.
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?"
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."
7 ... Get sued for non-competitive practices, have millions of current Android owners get pissed off, see small businesses everywhere turn to Google mail, and loose profit.
I rarely read replies, it's my opinion and if you thought about your opinion a little more, I'm OK with that.
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;
With WP7 crashing, and Nokia committing to WP7 in a big way, I wonder if WP7 would take Nokia down with it...
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.