Congratulations all round to the team at Microsoft’s Windows Phone team. As I suspected, the consumer has reacted warmly to the platform’s simplicity, nice looking handsets and keen pricing.
It’s not everyone’s cup of tea, but it’s certainly winning legions of admirers. Wherever I took the Samsung Omnia 7 or HTC HD7, it drew many-a-glance. And when you look deeper, it does a super job of the main functions that your average consumer wants. There’s now a good amount of apps, there’s a healthy developer community (18,000 developers now) and even Apple users haven’t been forgotten with the release of the stunning Windows Phone Connector (beta)app that will sync all your iFavourites (iTunes/iPhoto and so on) beautifully with your Windows Phone.
Achim Berg, Corporate VP of the Mobiles Communications & Marketing Group at Microsoft is quoted on Microsoft’s News Center explaining:
We are pleased that phone manufacturers sold over 1.5 million phones in the first six weeks, which helps build customer momentum and retail presence.
Achim points out that Microsoft is working to a long view strategy:
We know we have tough competition, and this is a completely new product. We’re in the race – it’s not a sprint but we are certainly gaining momentum and we’re in it for the long run.
I’m pleased the company’s having success. The marketplace needs an aggressive and capable competitor in Microsoft to keep pushing the rest of the players.
The HTC HD7, by the way, is a very nice handset with a super screen. More on that soon!
I assume those are shipped rather than sold
Aye — sold to operators, basically
Can’t say I’ve seen many on the street. But I did see one today on Stansted Express!
I’m beginning to see more and more of them around Sebastian!
Realizing the number of corporations that us MS, of the 1.5mm shipped, I bet a good deal of those go to corporate accounts where their IT department is switching over from Blackberry to MS.
If this is true, (as I know two Fortune 100 companies doing this), then I wonder how much of the sales have to do with “loving” the OS and how much has to do with an IT department mandating a switch.
Now, in the end, a sale is a sale. And I do believe MS has successfully entered the game with a great product. But owning the enterprise in the States, and then coming out with an OS that brilliantly merges the two devices, thus lessening the headaches for an IT department, goes a long way into getting handsets into the hands of consumers.
I do believe this is where you will see a great deal of sales over the next 18 months as corporate contracts expire.
Giff
That’s 1M a month, or 12M a year if it’s a uniform distribution, which it isn’t. WinMo was selling over 20M a year back in 2007/2008. The new one’s got aways to go…
Aye
Selling that big number in as short as 6 months is not easier. For a brand like Microsoft, it can be a easier task, since it has global reach and good feedback from its existing users.
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