It is common to hear that no news equals good news… but it does not really seem the case for the guys at Microsoft regarding their mobile phone story.
Silence, as in that famous tune by Simon and Garfunkel, can be really loud, even more than the cheerful reporting when success is there, like it happened with Kinect.
Silence as well about the potential upgrades that are badly needed does not help either. When will the famous “cut & paste” basic feature show up?
The more they wait, the smaller chunk of the pie they’ll get, though they still have the potential benefit from the corporate and enterprise market, that to much extent has a Microsoft based IT. But even there, RIMM and Nokia can be too far it they keep on slowing down, or if they fail to move fast. Even the slowest of the slowest, that is, Palm, might move ahead of them if they ever start. Particularly if they deliver a confusing message to this segment.
The market does not wait for sound names and brands if they do not really deliver.
Hi Guys,
ReplyDeleteI agree that the silence likely means the sales numbers are not as impressive as the Kinect or iPhone and Android.
But the question is, what was expected?
It was clear from Microsoft, that they knew they were late to the game and were missing features on launch. They have publicly admitted this. So I doubt they expected it to fly off the shelf on launch. Bloggers will have a field day with the numbers, but looking at in that context tells a different story, I think.
The latest reports are Copy and Paste in January and another update in February that addresses Multitasking and "several other" things.
That seems pretty good.
Will it outsell iPhone or Android anytime soon? I doubt it.
Will Microsoft give up? I doubt it.
Can it take a comparable market share slice over the next few years...say top 3 with iPhone and Android? Maybe.
If they keep updating this quickly, and continue to improve the phone. The groundwork they did on the phone is solid. All the reviewers like the UI and it's built in features. The complaints are around missing functionality that other phones have. If they add most of those features by February and are on all the major cell providers...do they not have a chance? It depends how fast they move vs. competitors.
We'll see. I would not count them out.