Did the Windows Phone 7 Bomb In the US? 609
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.
If You're Late to the Party (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Failed launch (Score:3, Interesting)
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.
Re:If You're Late to the Party (Score:5, Interesting)
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... (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
That's because people remember the past versions (Score:2, Interesting)
People are not excited because past versions of their OS have had such serious issues, that why would people want to put themselves through that again?
I knew so many people that switched to Android, the Palm Pre, and the iPhone from a Windows Phone because they got tired of rebooting their phone on a daily basis.
Re:While I agree it's not as good as... (Score:3, Interesting)
You can argue that sales will pick up after Verizon starts carrying it next year and once natural turnover will force people to buy new phones, but I'd put it as 50-50 that this is the highest rate of sales that they'll ever see with this OS and that from here on out it's downhill. While I don't think this will be another Kin that will get pulled from the shelves in a few months, they haven't made nearly the impression they need to in order to get any sort of widespread awareness of the public that this is a useful thing to buy.
For the record, I don't own an iphone, nor do I text, nor to I patronize the apple store with any regular frequency.
Re:While I agree it's not as good as... (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:While I agree it's not as good as... (Score:3, Interesting)
I think if you want to make a penetration into a crowded market, you've got not just do as well as the competition, you've got to do a lot better than the competition. Remember: cell phones and mp3 players were supposedly a "crowded market" too when Apple released theirs.
Re:Actually yes... (Score:5, Interesting)
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?
Re:If You're Late to the Party (Score:2, Interesting)
Big marketing mistake... (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
Re:If You're Late to the Party (Score:5, Interesting)
They're not selling a phone, at least, not according to the ads. They're selling an excuse. Otherwise, how can it be "the phone for people who want to do other stuff than be using the phone."
They practically come right out and imply that it's going to be as buggy as an un-patched windows 95 machine...
Re:If You're Late to the Party (Score:1, Interesting)
I'm sure that WP8 will be better than than WP7 but it will likely still be deficient in some way. Historically, Microsoft has a weird ability to start to get a product right at about it's third iteration. If this pattern holds, then I expect WP9 to be a success.
Re:Far too early to say (Score:3, Interesting)
The "facts", as they were presented in the story, were based on comparing an opening day (a Monday) to a launch weekend (incidentally a time when people have more time for shopping, if you didn't know) and a launch month. It is evident that this proves nothing.
MS Employee phones - buying retail and expensing (Score:2, Interesting)
These numbers could be VERY inflated due the MS employee WP7 phone program. I have it on good knowledge that employees are instructed to go out to a retail outlet and buy their phone. Then expense it. Pretty easy way to pad your stats.
Re:I'll be brave and fess up.... (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:While I agree it's not as good as... (Score:3, Interesting)
Those tv commercials are so awful, they make no sense. I think they're saying people are too fascinated and in love with their phone, and win7 phones are going to fix that for you.... wait, what? .
Exactly, you're gonna have Win Phone 7 so much you won't want to use your phone.
If a phone actually got you in and out of social apps and done with messages quicker, all it would do is enable the thumb-typing generation to send *MORE* messages in the same amount of time, not spend less time on their phhones. It's possible that they would spend even more time on the phone since it would be more convenient than before.