Windows Phones Getting Buried At Carriers' Stores 412
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. . . (Score:4, Interesting)
'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?
Re:Verizon won't roll them out to kiosks. . . (Score:5, Interesting)
Its funny to see MS getting the short end of the monopoly stick. Just deserts.
Re:Verizon won't roll them out to kiosks. . . (Score:5, Funny)
How can you say that? It's so cruel to poor little MS - getting shoved around by the big boys! :-( I want to join a "help MS defeat the system" society - do you know if there is one yet?
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But you don't have to live in either. There's a whole life out there where you do not need them.
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I have lived in a Microsoft world. and I wouldn't wish it on my worst enemies.
water boarding is better than living in Microsoft's world.
Apple for all of it's glamor and shiny will never be over 20% market share for long. Apple can drive the industry forward like mercedes and BMW have driven forward cars. (airbags where standard in Mercedes in 197-something. Then Ford and toyota and Honda(android developers) can come in with stuff for the rest of us. Microsoft is somewhere between yugo, chrysler, and Kia
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Re:Verizon won't roll them out to kiosks. . . (Score:4, Insightful)
the Verizon rep's job is to get a subscription, matching the customer with a device that most closely meets their needs and makes them want to buy. Their job is not to push particular handsets off onto consumers in the same proportions as they have them in stock.
Since no one comes into a store asking for a Windows phone handset, what is there that would make someone recommend it to a customer? At this point, nothing.
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That's the theory, yes. But when you factor in things like "How much kickback do we get for selling your phones?" that picture changes. A lot.
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A good many purchases of this kind are going to be made by people who saw their friend/relative/co-worker with a smartphone of some type. Since iPhones and Androids dominate the market, when people are discussing which item to buy with the rep, the first thing the potential buyer is going to say is "I want an iPhone/Nexus just like my best friend Bob." At the point, as you point out, the rep, if he's any kind of salesman, is going to go where the customer is leading, and not just sort of randomly insert a
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I wonder if, given RIM's spectacular fall, if there won't be some kind of soul-selling between Blackberry and MS to get both of themselves back into the market?
Re:Verizon won't roll them out to kiosks. . . (Score:4, Insightful)
Which for 95% of all customers would be an iPhone. Don't mistake me for an Apple fanboi, we have 4 Apple products in our household of which only two were purchased within the last year and none of those are mine: an iMac 27" and a spanking brand new white iPhone. Both belong to my wife. (The other two products are a 1st gen iPod Shuffle, which is mine and a 2nd gen iPod Mini which belongs to my wife.... Neither of those get much use anymore).
I'm a nerd, I admit that and proud of it. My wife, however is at the other side of the spectrum. You pretty much can't get less tech inclined as her and for people her generation (born in the eighties) that is still very common. As a matter of fact, she used to have a Windows computer and it was always "jts, can you do this for me, jts can you do that for me, ad infinitum". It's not that I don't love my wife, but if you've been married for a while that really gets on your nerves. So we bought an iMac. Now there is the occasional question, but much less trouble. I set her up an iTunes account so she could buy music. She never did.
What does this all have to do with the iPhone? Simple. A few month ago her trusty old Samsung cellphone died. Being the cheapskate I am, I bought her a new touchscreen HTC. Not the highest end, because if I'd go high end I could just as well buy an iPhone, right? She agreed with me: don't spend too much money on a stupid phone. The thing is: She was completely unable to use the phone. Calls went off without her wanting it, writing SMSes was hard (We use at least 3 languages on a daily base, so the typical T9 needs to be disabled and the on-screen keyboard needs to work well, including accentuation and stuff like that) I didn't believe her, I thought it would just be a matter of her getting used to it. Not so... After a good month and a half she was still struggling.
Again, as married guys know, having a wife complaining about the same thing over and over gets fast quick. Just to get rid of the complaints, I decided to get her an iPhone... I set it up to use our wireless, connected it to her iTunes account and registered it with her iMac and imported her iTunes music (which I ripped from CD years ago when she was still using Windows).
I got basically no questions, she managed to type SMSes (in all languages) and to do her calls and it didn't call accidentally when she didn't want it to. Within a day she started to send emails with pictures to her friends (she'd never done that on a computer AFAIK) Within two days, she had found how to download apps (mostly books apps and to my utter stupefaction she had bought a few music albums. The third day, we sit in a pub with a friend of her. She asks me to take a picture of them. I do, give her back the phone and she sends is immediately to the email of said friend. Not even thinking twice that she was now using 3G instead of the Wifi at home.
That is what the iPhone does... It enables the non-tech user to use technology. It's utterly amazing. Actually, I expected this to happen when she switched computers to the iMac, but that was not where the big "enabling" happened. The iPhone did, and if you ask me... Instead of having bought that huge-ass iMac, I should have bought her an iPad. Would have been much cheaper.
I do realize that I am comparing a cheaper phone with an iPhone and that I'm sure that the touch screen is the major reason of her inability to use the HTC. I've taken the HTC into use now. It' ok... I got "used to it", but is that really what we want? The user to "get used to it"? If the iPhone weren't so friggin expensive, I'd consider one for myself but one 50€ plan per month in this family is enough.
If the task of the salesperson is to meet the users needs, then I'd bet money on it that the iPhone fits the needs of normal (non-geek) people best.
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I think that's part of it, but it rolls back neatly to the point of the article, that when you say "iPhone" you know what you're getting. When you say "HTC" you have a number of choices, some good and some bad, but for a consumer who simply wants an easy to use phone that will meet their needs, saying "I want an iPhone" works. I've seen some awesome Android handsets (including one with the great 'trace your finger on the k/b to type' which I wish the iPhone had), and I've used some awful ones. You just have
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The real thing? And you claim that you're no Apple fanboi?
Why would you get a Samsung? Maybe because you think Android is a better OS than iOS? Maybe because the best carrier in your area doesn't have iPhones? Or maybe you just like to think differently.
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No. The rep's job is to maximize revenue and, more importantly, profits, for the organization. That may frequently involve pushing a product that is not the best match to the customer's needs. This may involve "upselling", or it may involve pushing the old stock that the supplier wants to unload. Some times it may even involve pushing the product that does be
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Four kinds. Blackberry hasn't disappeared yet.
You're right about people only buying two of them, though.
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I'm more inclined to trust Verizon knows more about making money selling cell phones than MS does. (and Verizon has a vested interest in making money selling contracts, not Windows phones) It would be interesting to see what sort of margin comparison there is between the phones they sell.
But then, MS is very well known to use their fat wallet to bankroll/subsidize new products to try to make up for them being late to market. It used to work well. Not so much anymore. I'd be surprised if MS wasn't practi
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Even where subsidizing has worked, it hasn't always worked. Sure, Microsoft has made huge penetration in the game console market, but has that division ever actually turned a profit?
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They're probably hoping to buy off enough of the market that they can stop so heavily subsidizing it and start to actually turn it into a money maker rather than a money loser. That's one thing I don't like about MS is when they use their wealth from other areas and try to use it to buy a market. Not having a bottommless well of venture capital is part of what keeps markets alive and growing/improving, and when a company like MS basically cuts a blank check for their first product into a market, it majorl
Re:Verizon won't roll them out to kiosks. . . (Score:4, Insightful)
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Crap. I've already commented, so I can't moderate.
+1 On Fscking Point.
Verizon cheerfully gives away craptacular feature phones. They don't need to barely make money (lose money?) on a Win 7P smartphone if they can get you on the same steady per-month wallet drain with something else. They sell other smartphones because people already know to ask for them.
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I can count the number of times I saw an add for iPhone from AT&T. they were almost always from Apple.
The hardware vendor needs to do the advertising. MSFT isn't a hardware vendor, and in a world of cheap knockoff n cheap hardware Samsung, HTC won't do but a hand full of ads for their 500 different models of each phone.
Apple just has one current model.
HTC, Samsung, etc should limit themselves to no more than 5 different models(carrier variations are not true models) at a given time that way they can f
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No kidding. Is anyone here naive enough to believe that Verizon isn't going to give the most highly demanded phones priority over the phones that nobody cares about? Does anyone here really think they don't put some effort into figuring out which ones are popular. If everyone was going to these kiosks and asking about Windows phones then they would quickly be supplied with windows phones.
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For very high profile devices, yes, they definitely have to cater to consumer demand(snagging iDevices as soon as AT&T lost their contractual grip, for instance, was barely optional, and building up the 'Droid' brand before they had iPhones to sell was similarly necessary); but the lower-profile you go, I suspect the greater Verizon's int
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'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?
It's not just the kiosks I was at the Verizon website a few weeks back and I simply couldn't pull up a Windows 7 phone. I could pull up older Windows Mobile devices but not WinPho7 I could Google all sorts of shit about them being available for Verizon but no Windows 7 product to be found. I check now and I see that I have 2 options, but hey I guess it's only been like 3 months since they launched for the carrier.
Re:Verizon won't roll them out to kiosks. . . (Score:5, Insightful)
'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?
...unless Microsoft is desperate enough to pay Verizon to promote WP7. For Verizon it's not a Catch-22. It's a catch-several-million-dollars-by-doing-nothing.
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Re:Verizon won't roll them out to kiosks. . . (Score:4, Interesting)
Not really. Microsoft has advertised them all over the place. I have seen them at AT&T and Verizon stores. kiosks almost never even have phones they have those stupid cheap fake phones with pictures for screens.
Windows Phone 7 is feature incomplete. Mango when it get here will bring WP7 up the the same standard as teh current iPhone and Android handsets but that is still not till fall.
Also Windows Phones is the past where enterprise devices while WP7 is less enterprise ready than Android and iPhone. They have no buzz and no real interest.
If Mango was out today they would be pretty interesting devices. They have some really good games and Zune Pass sounds like a killer deal. Oh and microsoft doesn't push ZunePass as a feature. The Xbox integration is at best okay IMHO but some people will love the little rewards.
So there you have it.
WP7 is flopping because the old market for Microsoft phones was the enterprise users and WP7 abandoned them.
The the target market remembers Microsoft as a business phone.
The tech writers and phone fans are all saying "It is cool but is missing a ton of features." So they are all excited about Mango and Nokia but that is in the future so the local tech experts are all saying get an Android or an iPhone today and look at WP7 when it comes out.
And the WP7 phones are no carriers hero device. AT&T made the iPhone their hero device for a long time. Verizon pushed the Droid line to compete with the iPhone and now they have an iPhone. TMobile was the launch carrier for Android and is still an Android fan. Sprint first tried to make the Palm Pre their iPhone killer and when that didn't work out because of the bad, half baked sdk and being feature incomplete "like WP7 is now" they went to Android and made the Evo 4g their hero device.
So no carrier is going to risk their hero device budget on a WP7 device today.
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The enterprise mobile market is pretty well served by existing players. Blackberry has BES, which is a steaming chunk of shit to be sure, but still works pretty damned well to link Exchange and their phones. iPhones and Androids all do a decent job of gaining access to Microsoft's enterprise offerings. I was watching a lady a month ago editing an Excel spreadsheet on her iPad at a conference I was at, and that's when it hit me. Anybody who is looking for access to email, schedules and documents based in
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The tech writers and phone fans are all saying "It is cool but is missing a ton of features." So they are all excited about Mango and Nokia but that is in the future so the local tech experts are all saying get an Android or an iPhone today and look at WP7 when it comes out.
By the time Mango comes out, they might catch up to where Android and Apple are today. But Android and Apple are not standing still; iOS 5 is slated for release when Mango comes out. I've heard about the 500 or so features of Mango but so far nothing in detail that has been too spectacular. It integrates well with other MS products like Xbox Live; if you don't have those services and have no desire to integrate, then some users will see little benefit.
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Yes, it's called trying to get your product into a market where other players have very deep penetration. Microsoft should be familiar with this, it's had the same problem trying to create a web presence that anyone gives a shit about.
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Now we see how Microsoft products compete when they don't have all those corrupt deals that made Windows so dominant. Sure, they have Nokia, but they need an alliance with a carrier too. Makes you wonder how much better off we'd be in the computing world if Windows never happened.
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MS is not used to having to compete (except perhaps in consoles), and there's no sense that they know how now. Ballmer was sent a message by the shareholders that he apparently didn't receive; he's either going to get scrappy, or get out. I'm betting on the latter.
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Take the cooperative marketing dollars! C'mon. Do it!
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On the other hand, Microsoft COULD pay them big bucks to provide shelf space
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Chicken or egg? (Score:2)
Windows Mobile (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Windows Mobile (Score:5, Insightful)
They not only have a reputation problem because of Windows in general, and because of the atrocious previous versions of Windows on the phone, but they are also 4 years behind the curve in the mobile space. The iPhone came out in 2007.
Microsoft is fourth to market with a fourth rate product. Why WOULD any consumer come in asking for it?
My guess is that MSFT will start giving the phones away to get some market penetration.
Re:Windows Mobile (Score:4, Insightful)
It's laughable, really. Redmond has spent the last twenty years waging the war of the desktop, even as, in the last five years, the desktop has faded in consumers' eyes. Heck, even in the business/corporate world, smartphones and tablets are beginning to show substantial inroads (Blackberry has got to be credited for that, even if it looks like another example of an early producer being unable to keep up to its newer competition).
At some point, you think Redmond marketers would have noticed that the enemy combatants weren't even bothering fielding a lot of soldiers any more. It was clear three years ago that Apple had seen the promised land and had put a huge amount of effort into the iPhone line. If that didn't send the message, the fact that Google began dumping huge resources into the Android operating system and was in fact getting some pretty sweet manufacturing deals should have suggested to these guys that maybe things weren't what they had been. But no, Microsoft was caught in the Vista drama and in promoting Windows 7 as the greatest thing since sliced bread.
The nightmare is coming, too. Blackberry was the first out of the gate with products that integrated with Microsoft's enterprise offerings, but everyone else was quick to the punch. Microsoft is increasingly faced with the possibility that it's twin product lines of Windows and Office/Exchange are about to be split apart. And once you've replaced Office and Outlook as the forward facing apps, how much longer before the drive to producing new back end offerings finally cuts the heart out of Microsoft's business? Just about everything else Microsoft does loses money, so they have got to be shitting themselves right now. Without Windows/Office/Exchange, in the long term, they are well and truly fucked.
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The lynchpin that is holding MSFT up right now is Windows licensing to business.
My workplace is starting to talk about piloting Macs to desktops. To coders, to support analysts, to systems analysts, etc. This would have been beyond fantasy five years ago. But now half the people making the decision have Macs in their household, and they know it's *nix based which is good, and they are ready to give it a go as soon as someone says "total cost of ownership"
If MSFT starts to see their corporate desktop install
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Ah but the iphone of 2007 had one feature none of the other phones on the market then(and most still today) had.
it was easy to use for anyone. You didn't need a degree in geek to use it, or hours of video training to access your emails.
Everything it did it did gracefully, and simply. You could hand someone who could barely use a computer the iphone and they could not only figure out how to make and receive calls, but also view websites.
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Yup. Apple did again what they have repeatedly shown a mastery in, and that's making a simple GUI that can be mastered quickly. It's irrelevant in many ways whether the original iPhone was only half as good as some of the offerings four years ago or not, what it was a sleek-looking product that was marketed brilliantly and within its limitations did a damned good job. Apple followed up soon enough with a new version much more capable, spawned the App Store, and the rest is history.
Re:Windows Mobile (Score:4, Insightful)
I remember this slightly differently -- the iPhone I got that first day in 2007 never crashed (like my Treo and Nokia), never crashed during phone calls (Treo), never pocket dialed (Treo and Moto), and was never stranded with a years-old OS while the carrier dragged their heels (Treo). It also lasted all day on a charge, and the battery door never fell off when I dropped it, and dust never clogged the SD slot on account of the lost the little blank that was supposed to cover it (Treo).
Also, when the touchscreen became unresponsive two weeks after I bought it, I was able to bring it to a store and get it replaced in 10 minutes, and backup restore worked perfectly. I never had to ship my phone somewhere and be phoneless for a week, only to get the phone back and be told that the techs in Arizona couldn't reproduce my problem (Nokia). It also had a web browser, maps app, and video player that was actually usable and didn't destroy the battery. It also had the nice Visual Voicemail thing.
It did not run apps. But the other stuff far outweighed the apps issue. Frankly if iPhones didn't have native apps TODAY I'd probably still be using the things. No Android manufacturer can match Apple's hardware service, or even tries to. All the apps in the world aren't worth having to wait a week to get a phone fixed through the mail.
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the problem is that windows mobile phones sucked THAT bad. Like Vogon poetry bad.
I hear that even the Azgoths of Kria carry iPhones.
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The only chance MS has to win customers over, is to disguise the product as a different name entirely, and not let consumers know that they are involved.
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Sprint (Score:2)
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Troll? or did you miss the HTC Arrive that came out in February?
Admittedly, it's not much compared with the stable of Android phones that they're carrying, but it's not nothing.
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It's foolish... (Score:2)
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...
Sounds like WebOS (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
MS can fix that easily... (Score:2)
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,
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Exchange is the mail standard, and if a phone doesn't work with ActiveSync, it will not sell past the consumer market.
Almost a cunning plan. Except that increasingly, people want to use their consumer phone with the corporate email (and if they are high enough up the food chain, will demand IT make it so).
Also, the refresh rates in the corporate sphere are not as fast as consumer.
So, it would make a decent amount of money for MSFT, but not as much as the potential to be had in the consumer market.
Re:MS can fix that easily... (Score:4, Insightful)
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RIM now offers Companies BESX a lite version that is free and offers at least the same features as active sync without needed special BES data plans.
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Which requires Exchange and only runs on certain versions of Windows, and has a slew of other restrictions.
If you run another ActiveSync capable server on a non-Windows platform you are screwed. And yes, some small-medium sized companies are looking to quality Exchange alternatives, such as Kerio (which requires far less resources to serve more people).
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Humm and Microsoft using their market share on the desk top in an anti-competitive way would go over so well.
Yea I see corporate customers throwing a fit if their blackberries and Android phones stopped working, the EU slapping a few billion dollar fine on Microsoft, companies migrating away from Exchange to Gmail, and a general destruction of Microsoft's market share in the enterprise.
Wow. That would be cool and it would only get better. You see WP7 isn't enterprise ready at all. The law suits would be fa
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Branding problem (Score:2)
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 cleve
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Windows Mobile vs. WP7 (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Failing because microosft isn't advertising? (Score:5, Insightful)
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?
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(And, I fail at correctly editing quote tags. Oops.)
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Actually, I liked Really [youtube.com].
Microsoft is their own worst enemy (Score:3)
WP7 vs Vista (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
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My last two phones were Windows Mobile. In fact my HD2 is excellent running this custom Rom
http://www.jayceooi.com/2010/08/12/download-htc-hd2-cookie-energy-windows-mobile-6-5-x-custom-rom/ [jayceooi.com]
I can drag and drop AVI files to it and watch them in the gym in TCPMP. I have a bunch of applications I use all the time.
All of that works on Android. None of it works on WP7. Guess what I'm buying next?
Not everything happens quickly (Score:2)
The iPhone may have taken off quickly, but it took Android a little while to get moving. It wasn't until around version 2 (and the Motorola Droid) that it really took off.
Carriers should not have Stores you should be (Score:2)
Nokia (Score:4, Interesting)
With WP7 crashing, and Nokia committing to WP7 in a big way, I wonder if WP7 would take Nokia down with it...
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What desperate companies often fail to realize is that those you're doing business with are doing it because they're equally desperate. It's rare that you get the easy ride on the coattails of a winner. Don't be surprised if Microsoft thought Nokia is huuuge, they'll get our phones in every shop everywhere and get us sales even if WP7 is only okayish. Not that I'm going to be terribly sorry if both Nokia and Microsoft took a beating, if only Nokia could pass on Qt to someone worthy.
Welcome to not being the market leader.. (Score:3)
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 [bryanquigley.com]
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.
They are too "open" for the carriers (Score:2)
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AFAIK, they locked down WP7, just like everything else (except a few select Android handsets and WebOS devices).
FTFA: Is There a Bias? (Score:3)
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.
Anecdotal evidence does not a valid argument make. (Score:5, Interesting)
WP7 phones now available? (Score:2)
I was under the impression that since Microsoft only announced Windows Phone 7 in February 2010, that a shipping product would be at least another 18 months away.
I'm speechless!
It's really just poor marketing on MS' part (Score:3)
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.
A matter of positioning (Score:2)
Re:Ok... (Score:5, Funny)
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 [tgdaily.com] to trounce the iPhone by 2015 if the carriers keep hiding it under the rotting corpse.
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MS at one point was good at copying ideas from the competition, and rolling them out fast. WP7, not so much. Until you see feature parity between Droid/iPhone/WP7 they're going to have a ways to go.
Now, to be fair to MS, they seem to be plodding along, there seems to be some, as yet undisclosed, strategy here for next year, or I would have expected Nokia to have a WP7 out the door already. That or they're both grossly incompetent, which is highly likely at this point, but either way, I'm guessing the big
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From the perspective of carrier control, strong platforms controlled by 3rd parties are not really a good thing. The cat is out of the bag with Apple at this point, so they just have to suck that up and hope for an exclusive; but Android is already there as a reasonably compelling second option, and under licensing terms that allow Google to exercise some control over their blessed flagship devices; but which don't preclude c
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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.
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It's the same problem as the desktop OS question: What should the OS do? For years the debate was whether or not it should even a have a front end GUI for lots of tasks (that does slow it down after all). But at some point an OS is just a tool to launch and facilitate applications. On a device like a phone you need to bake in some phone software to go with it. But really, how much do you want the OS to do?
Reaching feature parity with what the operating system itself (and the relevant bundled tools) doe
Re:Ok... (Score:5, Funny)
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!
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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.
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On top of that, the message of the commercials are people who spend time on their smartphones are losers
Maybe they are going for the large and untapped low-self-esteem smartphone market.
My interpretation... (Score:2)
"You won't waste as much time on your smartphone because you'll just hate using it that much".
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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
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