WP7: Poor sales?
There has been a lot of talk about what OS shipped what amount of units and how well or how bad that particular OS did. Symbian was clearly visible in every chart and so was its declining market share. But where was Windows Phone?
Is it such a failure that it doesn’t even register on analysts radar?
A lot of people certainly would like to see Windows Phone fail, in fact there are several people that already claim Windows Phone has failed. But did it?
If we only look at the numbers available and compare them one to another than WP does appear to have failed. Yet there is more to it than that, let us start by looking at some key figures.
The key figures for Microsoft’s Windows Phone are:
Currently available languages
- English
- Spanish
- Italian
- German
- French
The potential market could be big, countries that speak one of the above languages are:
- USA, UK, Scotland, Ireland, Canada
- Spain, South America sans Brazil
- Italy
- Germany, Austria
- France, Switzerland and certain African countries
Eventhough the countries mentioned above make up a fairly large number of countries only 30 countries had the opportunity to buy a Windows Phone device on a choice of 60 operators. And of those 30 countries only 16! were able to buy apps from the Marketplace. With apps being a major factor for a smartphone OS these days you can imagine that not having Marketplace access is a dealbreaker for a lot of people.
Countries with ability to buy apps in the Marketplace
- Australia
- Austria
- Belgium
- Canada
- France
- Germany
- India
- Ireland
- Italy
- Mexico
- New Zealand
- Spain
- Switzerland
- Puerto Rico
- UK
- USA
Basically only 16 countries have the full Windows Phone experience, a laughable small potential market for WP. Especially if you compare it to the reach Nokia has with Symbian, a reach that ranges most likely to well over a 100 countries, but the Mango update should bump the 16 up to 35, more than doubling the potential market.
Shipped volume
Now that the core numbers for WP are written out we can get down to what it apparantly shipped since it’s launch.
Microsoft reported it had sold 1.5 million handsets to carriers in mid-December, in late January however they reported a total sale of 2 million units to carriers.
So in about a months time Microsoft managed to sell another 500,000 units to carriers. Why would carriers buy another 500,000 units (a full third of the amount bought a month ago) if the OS was a failure?
Two million handsets in the market at the end of January, not in the hands of consumers though. But still, if only 674,000 were sold as said by mr. Murtazin why would there be restocking of units by the carriers? Why would you restock if you didn’t even sell half of what you originally had in stock?
Only one real explanation, carriers sold most of the stock they had and were restocking units.
Indicator: US Market?
Nielsen calculated a market share of 2% for Windows Phone at launch, this grew to 7% and remained at 7% up until Q1 2011. Unfortunatly Nielsen didn’t provide a total smartphone volume for that period so it is hard to determine how many units they are talking about.
There is another research piece by comScore that does provide additional data and it coincides with the 7% from Nielsen. comScore provides a total volume of nearly 70 million smartphone users in the USA. Let’s say that only 2% of the 7% are WP devices and the others are Windows Mobile 6.x devices, even then WP7 still has 1,3 million handsets in the market.
The above is all gathered from various sources so reliability isn’t garantueed however it was calcuted with a decent margin making the 1,3 million WP handsets fairly reasonable and believeable.
Aside from actual research, AT&T’s Jeff Bradley (SVP Mobile Devices) was recently asked by PCMag how things were going with WP on AT&T. Jeff was caught saying that it was doing fine and was on target with their expected goals for WP.
He also mentioned that the release schedule of Microsoft’s OS didn’t allow them to release additional devices in between launch in October and the release of Mango. They probably want to wait for updated specifications that feature next generation CPU’s and the addition of gyroscopes. (apparantly a chassis specification imposed by Microsoft for next-gen devices.)
Conclusion
Windows Phone isn’t shipping an enormous volume (yet?) but it isn’t all doom and gloom as some people lead to believe. The fact of the matter is, is that Windows Phone is a new Operating System that is still in the shallow end of the pool. Just like with Android in the early days, people tend to see what it is from the side, and only that small group of early adopters takes the plunge.
This is however no reason for Microsoft to go slow with their development, they need to be fast about it in this stage of the game and deliver.
Until Windows Phone is available in a comparable market to the existing bunch of iOS, Android and of course Symbian we can’t say for sure that WP has failed. Still though, it’s a rough road ahead for the young upstart OS, and so it is for Nokia. But two negatives can make a positive, don’t they? 
Source 1: TNW
Source 2: comScore
Source 3: WP Central
Editor’s note: All of the above doesn’t imply that Windows Phone is currently a succes, but neither is it the failure as some media outlets are implying. What it does say however is that we need to look at things for what they are and look beyond what’s visible at first glance.
To all the commenters below, please refrain from namecalling etc. Discussing can be done without it, Thanks!
Category: Nokia, Windows Phone
About the Author (Author Profile)
Did you like my post? Want to read more of my brainwaves? Follow me on twitter @HarangueMNB and see what kind of other stuff I blurt out every now and then. Need to contact me directly? harangue.mnb@gmail.comSubscribe
If you enjoyed this article, subscribe to receive more just like it.
Hi Jay, would you like to do a review for Baidu IMD and Sogou IME? They both support portrait QWERTY keyboard
Good read, too bad this posts comments will devolve into a pissing contest and fanboys raging..
It’s not about fanboy’s raging it’s because the balance of things has gone wrong . If only you would have stayed on the wp7 bandwagon it would have been ok , but since Jay also joined it the Things got outta hand
lol . Any way been wanting to ask you this for a long time jay , What subjects did you take for A level and what was the result [ just curious]
It’s not a bandwagon you know. It’s simply a matter of regular use and realizing just how hard Symbian made my life in some regards. Unfortunately those regards are the same ones I use the most, browsing, gaming, texting.
Time of rage is over. Nobody cares anymore.
am goin 2 buy my last symbian phone N8 soon, n wait n see how market change 2 buy wats popular at that time
[quote]
The potential market could be big, countries that speak one of the above languages are:
USA, UK, Scotland, Ireland, Canada
South America sans Brazil
Italy
Germany, Austria
France, Switzerland and certain African countries
[/quote]
Ehm… Spanish is not spoken in Spain?
Oops, of course it is. Changed.
And Scotland is still part of the UK, despite the recent victory for the SNP in the recent local elections.
Android became a success mainly because it’s open and geeks like it. Geeks like it and therefore geek sites talk about it. When there’s talk there are the followers.
I don’t see geeks talk about WP phones anywhere (but I’m not particularly looking for that either, so maybe there is?)
WP has been a failure, both on units sold and speed of updates. If there’s similar phones/HW/features with Android OS, people are choosing Android.
Been updated faster and more reliably than Android has in the V1.0 – 2.2 era.
So you mean that tiny little NoDo Update?
The first big one is yet to come…
Funny then that from version 1.0 to 1.6 there were little if any changes and 2.0 didnt come until end of 2009 to the Droid ONLY. But yes
Justify it however you wish
So you really compare android with windows phone?
Android was more like a tryout by google. That’s why it wasn’t their only option back then (remember the big plans they had for Chrome OS that got smaller and smaller after they realized that Android could be successful and used for other devices too?).
Android was Google’s first mobile OS, while MS has a past with their never really successful Windows Mobile. So MS should be able to deliver more then Google.
Just cause they renamed it and changed the UI, it doesn’t make WP a complete new mobile OS
The fault of WP – it’s closed and it’s MS. Nothing more to add.
Honestly it seems you’re desperately trying to find something positive where there is not. Get real, even with all the money MS put on promoting WP7 (and killing Symbian and MeeGo), it smells dead.
+1
Yeah, all I see here is confirmation bias, and often based on completely incorrect assessment of fact. Notably, Microsoft has never published any unit sales to carriers, since it doesn’t actually sell phones. Microsoft only gives us license sales to manufacturers, and it has even stopped doing that. Probably because the numbers are very far from flattering.
I don’t think WM7 sold more than 1M devices in Q1 and I believe Canalys’s assessment was approximately in agreement with that. They believe that a total of around 2.5M WP7 handsets have been sold to date. In total. That’s since the platform’s launch in October. If they’re right, that’s a performance that can only be summed up as HORRENDOUS.
The lumping together of Windows Mobile and Windows Phone 7 is a mistake on the author’s part as well, and inferring anything based on those numbers is speculative at best.
What we do know is that Microsoft launched its all new mobile OS with devices from numerous top-tier manufacturers, at fully-subsidized prices on dozens of carriers in dozens of countries across the globe, spent hundreds of millions of dollars advertising it… And it’s losing mobile market share.
As someone else in this thread pointed out, Android and iOS already offer consumers everything that WP7 aspires to, they’re fully baked right now and they’re very well established. Why would you pick a product with aspirations that might hopefully be met in 6 months or a year or simply never when you could pick one that delivers right this second?
By the time Nokia starts selling its first WP7 device its unit volumes will be further emaciated, its customers long gone, and Windows Phone 7 will be on life support. It will be like jolting a dead guy’s heart with a defibrillator on a medical drama. Watching the body twitch will be pretty fun for a while but the patient is still dead.
Nokia might be able to deliver several million units to WP7 per quarter initially, but that won’t make it more than a bit player in smartphones – single digit market share percentages.
Stephen Elop and Steve Ballmer like to make hay about “the third ecosystem.” That may not ultimately prove wrong, but it will be a very, very distant third.
Yep. If history will repeat itself – WP will fail with Nokia as it did with many vendors before. So far there are no indicators it’ll do any better than before.
If you have a good product you don’t need to wait it to release in 195 countries to get a result ..!
you can get it from single market ..! Its about how well it’s doing on that market, WP7 relesed in those countries where Mobile phone users – Smart phone users- are high..! WP7 failed get peoples attention, thats a failure ..! it may become no 2 or no 1 in the future , its a different story ! at present its FAILURE my friend
+1 for the above comment
Still almost everything depends on the next major update…after that only one can conclude !
Unfortunately, the exact thing can be said about Symbian^3. We are always left waiting for the next update to bring it up to speed. We are waiting now just to get a portrait keyboard. After that, we have to wait some more to get the supposed “New Browser.”
To be honest, the only reason I don’t like WP7 is the lack of features. Features I currently have and features I am enjoying a lot with my Symbian-powered Nokia N8.
If they manage to put everything my N8 has in a single-device running WP7, WP8, WP9 or whatever else they may want to produce, and improve on it, I will happily and quickly migrate to the new system, whatever it is named: Windows Phone, Android, iOS, Bada, WebOS, you name it.
Until then, though, I will not care at all about the platform. Which does not mean I will not appreciate to read news about it, which is the way I do to check whether the features I want have been integrated to the platform.
In the mean time, WP7 is dead for me. Symbian is currently far superior to every other mobile OS at the moment, and specially on the system core, kernel, etc. At this moment, iOS is the only other OS that is similarly secure and has a good core, however this is only possible because the App Store rules are very strict, so even if you wanted you would not be able to try breaking something in the OS with your app, be it malicious code or bad code, because bad code gets rejected, and this is why apps are better developed; else, they won’t go to the App Store. On the other hand, Symbian can handle any app you throw at it with the same security and system stability you would expect, even if you throw bad code at it.
The problem is: there are more bad code being thrown at it (apps) than it was supposed to happen… the system is still doing fine, the bad-coded apps are not: look at Skype. The previous 1.5 version was terrible, filled with bugs and lackluster, did not have the expected features which includes video calling. They did fix most of it on 2.0, but it’s still far from being as polished as the Android or iOS Skype app. And this is Skype’s fault, not Nokia’s or Symbian’s.
I’m not picking on Skype, it’s just the first example that came to my mind. There are other half-assed apps released for Symbian, such as Asphalt 5 from Gameloft, which just ripped off the whole game during the port instead of trying to optimize it AT ALL. “It’s not running well with these textures. Shall we optimize the way the system is handling them? NO, let’s just resize them to 1/10 of the original size.” Etc. It should be common knowledge that different platforms handle the same code differently, so you have to optimize it for every platform. Most systems even run on different hardware, which makes a lot of difference.
The Pro Evolution Soccer port for Symbian was actually very well done and well optimized, but the developers couldn’t bother (or most likely didn’t have the time, because they probably code for many other platforms too) to recreate the images to the 16:9 aspect ratio, and so we have black borders. Still, I am very happy to have them release the game for Symbian, and I happily paid to play their game on my phone.
Some of you may be wondering, “what does he mean by all that?”
I mean time is money. Money is what matters to big companies. And people don’t spend money on things that take too much time, because what is important is what you can get right now, not what you can get in a year from now. Nokia seems to be living off of vaporware right now. MeeGo took too long, so they gave it up. It took them too much time to sort the Nokia management, decision-making, etc, and this reflected all Nokia developer teams and the development of the OS itself, which took a lot longer than it should, for everything.
Last week I read on Twitter a friend of mine complaining about his iPad. But he wasn’t complaining about any feature, app or the OS itself. He was complaining that he had updated his iPad’s software on Monday, and another update was released on Tuesday, so he would have to update again. I can’t see any Symbian user saying this, ever.
And if Nokia can’t respect time themselves, you can’t expect developers to take their own time for developing apps to the OS.
If all fails, I’m moving to iOS. With my primary phone, Nokia N8, on my right hand, and an iPhone for gaming on my left hand. Because it’s been quite some time since Gameloft or other big or well-known company released a good game for Symbian. I hope this situation changes for the better, quickly.
gd1
+111111
the number of updates isn’t always a proof of quality.
For example ios: iphone 3g lagged after update to ios 4, this issue had to be fixed by another update. Or problems with battery life caused by updates.
On the other hand i got about 4 or 5 updates for my c7. Of course smaller ones.
The iPhone 3G has such mediocre hardware that you probably should be lucky to haven have an update for it. It would be the same like an N97 getting an update to S3 (if it wasn’t for the lack of a GPU needed for S3) it would lag like crazy, heck it already did on original firmware.
Excellent post. I would check out webOS before you commit to iOS, but definately understand webOS isn’t for everyone. Good luck! I will be doing the same thing, and who knows maybe a few years down the road we will be back at Nokia because you are right, it is functionality and design that I care about too.
dude. if you wanted to avoid a massive contest here, you would have chosen a less troll bait name. =.=
o well i remember. Buy a wp7 device and get a xbox for free.
Well, you say that Android also started small and slow. Fine, but this is 2011. No one so far could give me a single reason why WP is superior to Android or iOS. On contrary: WP is as closed as iOS, but does not have nearly as many apps. And it does not have Apple’s hype around it. And Android is available on hundreds of handsets, some of them come close to Nokia’s HW reliability. And there are tons of apps for Android, and Google is running full steam to improve the system.
So, Nokia, the old brand for old people, and WP – where MS apparently is not able to come up with versions for the Asian markets – get together and will produce what? Well, let’s wait and see, in the meantime the smart phone market grows elsewhere.
So, why did you ditch Symbian and Maemo/Meego, Mr Elop, for an OS that is not even available for your most important markets in Asia?
Windows phone is a flop, and Nokia is no where attractive enough to change WP’s fortunes. And why does the author of this blog entry think it is a good excuse for WP’s dismal sales results that WP is available only in a handful countries? I think it is Microsoft’s failure that they are not able to offer their system for the global market.
The question is even stronger. If WP is so an early OS, why not to use Meego which is also early, but which is free from the grip of the MS empire?
Because MeeGo has neither devices, operator suppport, OEM support and/or a set release date
2 billion dollars and a CEO that comes from the same company.
I have the E7 and the HTC HD7. Since i live in Malaysia the WP7 market is out of bound for people like me. My HD7 is now just a glorified Mp3 player. Switched back to Symbian because i missed all the awesome features available on this “dead” platform. I cant even sell my HD7 because nobody wants it. They all know its sleek OS but with NO features. What is the point of WP7 when it cant even function as a “smart” phone?
The E7 just won the best phone in Indonesia. It seems people outside the lucrative US market appreciates Symbian despite it’s slowness
I am not thinking of buying the pink N8 to complete my Nokia collection.
I gave WP7 5 months to impress me and it has failed to do so. I will give it another chance with MANGO. We’ll see what happened after that. As of now WP7 is a major fail. I would rather jump to Android than stick with WP7!
on a side not there are 5 times more Symbian users in Malaysia than Android its nearest rival, IOS phones are just too expensive for us “poor” asian.
see this:
http://www.engadget.com/2011/05/08/comscore-report-finds-widening-android-lead-in-us-smartphone-mar/
WP7 sales dropping even in US!!!
Those numbers aren’t sales, but subscribers. Those 625.000 less ‘Microsoft’ subscribers could be old Windows Mobile 6.x users migrating to Android because of it’s openness.
Even if it were about sales, they should be expected to drop. No new devices out apart from some for AT&T and no real advances in the OS until the Mango update.
Right, so according to you sales are expected to drop – no new devices.
Not available in most parts of the world, sales drop where available, no one brings new devices, no excitement. Tell me, what then is your definition of flop?
it’s official stephen elop was a trap for Nokia this whole time……. Poor fins and symbian users
The iPhone launched in one country, and it was just one phone.
WP7 launched in 16 countries with 5+ phones and millions in advertising and it’s not even close to doing well.
One can understand Android’s slow start because there was just one ugly phone on a rather small carrier in one country but WP7′s failure isn’t even comparable.
I guess so many visitor of this blog are always jump to conclusion. The maker of this post doesn’t even tell anything about windows phone success. The maker oh this post doesn’t say that WP is failed either success.
And then what’s about analyst????
Analyst make a prediction base on situation that will remains the same as the time the analyst make their prediction. Mobile tech world is fast moving. One of the most anylist prediction, i think, that must be about Nexus 1 prediction. I remember that analyst said that by the end of the year Google will sell 5 million units Nexus 1, but it ends up sold 80.000 units/month. That’s ridiculous. Analyst on the mobile tech world is just for fun. There is nothing take from them.
dismal. Man, I hate duopoly.
here in Greece Windows Phone 7 is popular despite the fact that it doesn’t support the language. It is only logical that with Mango it’ll kick some serious a**
I like the article, fairly unbiased, but unfortunately your numbers completely disregard the fact that Windows Mobile 6.5 exists. Window Mobile 6.5 compared to WP7 on usa carriers: AT&T 2/3, Sprint 2/1, T-Mobile 0/1, Verizon 2/0, TOTALS: 6 Windows Mobile 6.5 phones/ 5 WP7 phones. There are more Windows Mobile phones provided by carriers than WP7, this needs to be factored into your analysis.
I don’t want a Windows Phone 7 for a few reasons.
1# It’s locked down hard, I can’t transfer files onto it, no file browser, no mass storage device, no drag n’ drop music, video whatever. WP7 for some reason has copied the very thing I hate about Iphone.
2# I like Google. I think Google search is amazing over 90% of the world uses it and so do I, Google Maps and Navigation is so good its ridiculous, I’m talking worldwide too. So why is Microsoft acting like these products don’t exist? If Microsoft wanted me to use WP7 make it work with the products I like. Let me change the default search engine and let me use Google Maps please. Don’t make me out to be an Android fanboy just because I want to use the products I use on the internet everyday. Even Android and Iphone allows me to make Bing or Google the default search if I want it to be.
Do I think WP7 looks amazing? Of course, its beautiful, the wayfinding is incredible, add some more customization and fix the bugs and it’s near perfect execution, I really like the update process too (despite the FUD its updating the way it should be done), unfortunately I will never ever buy one if it doesn’t change the above. If the WP7 hopefuls can get the above changed I’ll think about buying, if not, I won’t.
Those WM6 devices are factored in, aren’t they? There is a part about 7% market share for MS in the USA. The 2% of the 7% (or 27% of the entire amount of MS devices out) that’s a WP device kind of factors in the WM devices.
its still very new and there aren’t a lot of choices atm.. and the choices that were there were plagued with some issues
im certain when nokia gets some units out sales will get a great boost
WP will have to sit on the benches until then
but by sitting on the benches for so long it might get a reputation among the masses of being garbage…
I think this will be embraced once cloud computing can be trusted and really takes off.
well, 1.3 million phones sold, or even the 2 millio with 16 models made by different manufacturers, that means 166 thousands handsets sold by manufaturer, in the same time nokia sold more than 5 million of N8′s which to detractors was a failure, I think any manufacturer want’s a failure of that size.
Had one of these for 6 months; waited over a year for it, big Windows user and fan. Hate Apple, don’t trust Google (they drop anything without warning if it doesn’t fly; like Waves). The comments here are mostly fair IMHO, in fact, they don’t highlight many of the massive usage/underperformance issues with the phone.
First up, I don’t care about the camera. Never use it and never have on any of the mobiles I’ve owned.
I do care about making phone calls, playing music and integration with calendars/contacts (Office etc). And it is in these areas that the phone/OS is so poor as to be almost unusable.
Zune on the PC is impenetrable as a user experience. On the phone with no support for folders or any other way to organise your tracks, it’s a failure and beyond use.
The lack of text style control means that contact names are HUGE while the phone numbers – the important bit – are tiny and, again, no folder support or other organisation means you’ve got one massive list of contacts you can’t read. Song titles on the other hand are huge but don’t scroll so you can’t read the long ones and landscape’s not available…
Finally, Microsoft are forcing users onto their cloud so there’s no integration with Windows Office. Outlook, Exchange etc. If you want that – and who doesn’t? – buy an Android or an iPhone. Incredibly, these platforms do offer integration with the Microsoft Office world.
Finally, and this is my single biggest gripe, there is no turn by turn spoken navigation on the Maps suite – which is awful by the way – and it looks like we’ll have to wait for Ovi to get it. And Ovi is the reason I moved from my Nokia N96 to the Wndows 7 Smartphone solution.
Do not buy this phone; do not buy any Windows 7 smartphone. Wait for Windows 8, there is simply too much wrong/missing with version 7 – and beyond understanding, how could people make these design decisions and keep their jobs, or get them in the first place? – for it to be corrected as a release and Microsoft will go back to the drawing board. At which time they will also be trying their level best to work with/include Nokia – a bit like Cameron and Clegg for UK readers – so God help us all.
I agree it is still to early to say whether wp7 is a success or failure. Its certainly not the start Microsoft was hoping for. However if initial numbers coming from Nokia about sales of their lumia phones are to be believed then things are definitely looking up.