Microsoft Shipped 2 Million Units of Windows Phone 7 Software Last Quarter | Hacker News Reader

Microsoft Shipped 2 Million Units of Windows Phone 7 Software Last Quarter

bloomberg.com

38 pointsazharcs47 comments

I moved from my iPhone (which finally bit the dust) to the LG Quantum. The nice things:

- Zune Pass. It's like Netflix for music, but you can carry your queue around with you even if you're off-signal.

- I stayed with AT&T, and have significantly fewer dropped calls and better signal quality than on my last phone.

- A single start screen with all the apps, auto-updating so you can see weather and other info without having to launch the app is really fantastic.

- No iTunes. The phone can just sync over WiFi, and there's no weird tethering-to-one-machine garbage.

- The keyboard! It's got two modifier keys (shift and FN), and the keys are large enough that I can type pretty quickly. I need to port a mini-emacs and a terminal window ASAP. It's that usable.

The not-good:

- The App Market really isn't there. And where there are similar apps, the ports smell of outsourced development, as many of them (Yelp and Kindle, I'm looking at you!) crash and/or just don't have a very smooth feel.

- Location services seems to have a lot of trouble figuring out where I am to anything smaller than a zip code.

- I'm not on Facebook or XBox Live, so I feel like some of the social integration is a bunch of work they did that I just miss out on. Fortunately, I could just remove those apps from the front screen.

- Trying to browse the Metro UI media app is a real pain. If I'm listening to a song, do I use the back button or swipe in a direction? Well, it depends on how I got to the Now Playing screen, and there are a few cases where I've been just stuck and had to close and re-open the app so that navigation would reset and I could get back to a artists list.

On Android the back button also has problems. It's definitely noticeable when the developer hasn't gotten it right. I recently tried out K9 (an alternative mail client), and you can end up navigating in circles (which causes application state confusion - is the state of the program global, so if I press back enough times to end up on the same menu, it's updated, or did I just travel back in time?).

It's easy to calculate. They claimed to have shipped 1.5Mio to carriers on the 21th of December. Now they claim it's 2 Mio. I'd expect that the carriers only order new phones after the old ones have been sold, so one can wager that the carriers sold around 500.000 phones since december the 21th.

So that's around 500.000 / 37. That makes it around 13.000 activations a day.

So given that the device was introduced beginning of November, it has been on the market for 2month and a couple of days. So then we have 13.000 * 85days = around 1.1 mio devices sold. The rest is waiting on shelves for eager customers. Doesn't sound too good.

Although today WP7 has the least global reach of any of the major smartphones. Android is on all carriers. iPhone is on fewer carriers in the US, but more worldwide, and Blackberry is everywhere.

W/o Verizon and Sprint they'll continue to struggle. And frankly they should have made sure they were on Verizon before iPhone. A US CDMA launch would have likely been better than a global GSM launch.

And the phone still has many holes in it. It looks like a great foundation, but they need to fix the holes a LOT faster than they've been doing.

Not fixing the holes is frankly inexcusable. And IMO probably the best indication that MS is culturally broken. I get having trouble rev'ing Office or Windows -- those have huge existing user bases (deeply entrenched inthe enterprise) so you have to be extremely careful and move with great deliberation. With phones they have no legacy, no current customers, aren't in the enterprise at all, are playing catch up, and have huge holes. If this isn't a time when you rev hard and fast, I'm not sure when it is. And they have a great model in Chrome of a team that can do it with high quality.

MS not being agile with WP7 would worry me more than threats to Office and Windows, because it indicates an inability to react.

I'm not so sure about this. If I'm Acme Phone Retailer and I ordered and stocked 150 phones for launch, and 3 months later I still have 100 of them, I'm not placing an order for another 50 phones. That would not only tie up valuable capital for a badly-selling product, but also tie up shelf space in the back and shelf space in the front.

It seems that this is licenses sold rather than activations.

I'd be interested in knowing their total activations for the quarter though it's certainly lower.

Doesn't compare well with the 300,000 activations/day Google claim to be doing.

Yeah, 2 million shipments over 3 months is around 33,000 a day, which is only 10% (or less, given Android's accelerating growth) of the activations that Google sees. And of course, not all those shipments are activations.

I wonder if they're not telling us about the activation numbers out because they're too low? Why else hide that information that every other company is bragging about? Not a quarter goes by where Apple and Google don't both release their activation numbers.

2 million shipments over 3 months is around 22,000 a day, not 33,000.

Oops! You're right. Thanks.

Because most of these are bundle deals to HW makers.

Samsung buys 10M OEM licenses for Windows7 for netbooks and MS throws in 1M Win7 phone licenses for free to make it's numbers look good.

It's like newspapers handing out free copies to hotels to boost their circulation figures.

> It's like newspapers handing out free copies to hotels to boost their circulation figures.

With the important distinction people actually read those newspapers.

And even the Daily Mail can be used to line the cat's litter tray!

Um -- have you seen what happens to the newspapers given away in hotels?

Have you seen what happens to WP7 licenses that are not used in actual phones?

Me neither.

Evidence?

From when do you need evidence to bash Microsoft and get modded up? Idle speculation is good enough.

You'd have to wait for a lawsuit for this kind of thing to come to light. Deals like this could be concealed in incentive tiers across products. Say, you buy 1M WP7 licenses for your future phones and you enter a tier where your Win7 license cost decreases enough to offset the cost of the WP7 licenses, plus a small incentive. Your WP7 licenses came, essentially, for free and they can brag about how OEMs are enthusiastic about WP7 and how that dooms the iPhone 5 or whatever other MacGuffin you choose to attract media attention.

That could be true, but it's basically idle speculation at this point. It's like accusing someone of murder and when asked for evidence, stating that the evidence will come out when the person is interrogated. Eh?

You can't say they hadn't manipulated license costs before.

10% is consistent with the market share numbers reported in the article:

> Microsoft’s share of the smartphone operating-system market declined to 2.8 percent [...] Android’s share increased to 25.5 percent [...]

Assuming that Windows Mobile 6.5- numbers are negligible by now.

The number of active Facebook native app users for Windows Phone 7 is probably a pretty reliable metric for active usage.

Windows Phone 7 / 366K

http://www.facebook.com/apps/application.php?id=7933375107&#...

Blackberry

http://statistics.allfacebook.com/applications/single/facebo...

Facebook for Android has close to 1 Million users, does that mean Android has sold 1 Million handsets (It has 300,000 activations everyday). I think assuming that everyone in this world is on Facebook is a wrong assumption.

No, the numbers dont mean anything in an absolute sense, but I can see the validity of an apples to apples comparison of the Windows 7 FB numbers to Android FB numbers. Although windows must have a greater % of users using FB

It's more like 25 millions: http://statistics.allfacebook.com/applications/single/facebo...

But Microsoft made an active decision to integrate WP7 with Facebook. Beyond that their marketing for the phone revolves entirely around social {or more accurately keeping up with your social network without spending your whole life doing so)

CNN even had an article entitled "WP7 is the real Facebook Phone" (http://articles.cnn.com/2010-10-15/tech/windows.phone.facebo...)

Put another way WP7 is to Facebook as Google Services are to Android. There might be a few rare individuals who use Android but don't have a gmail account but those people are by far the exception.

Do the numbers you're quoting include the people using Facebook through that built-in integration (the People hub)? Or do they only count the dedicated Facebook app?

Are the users just using Facebook through the People hub counted here? I suspect many or most don't bother installing the dedicated app.

My own like/ dislike list:

Likes: 1. Games - need for speed and others are very cool. 2. facebook integration just works. When reading an email it is nice to see the sender's photo (pulled from FB if he is in FB friend's list). 3. Amazon Kindle reader - the list of free books helps. 4. Voice search in Bing (needs no training) 5. Tiles for different apps looks cool and easy to use. 6. Boots up in less than 30 seconds. 7. Zune manages podcasts quite good - this is a good way to use the office transit time 8. Market place is actually decent.

Dislike: 1. No serious API yet, for example no access to camera or compass. 2. battery life on HTC Mozart is 1 day after fairly good amount of talk time + wifi + GPS + gaming. This is actually not a problem because it runs for atleast one day - but it could have been better.

Both people I know who got one recently bought it because it came with a free XBox 360 as part of the plan. In both cases it was their first "smartphone" and one of them explained how confused he was by the whole thing.

At $8-$15 per license they are charging, thats $16-$30M. They still have some ground to make up on the $1B or so dropped on the Kin. Does not seem like this can ever be a profitable business for them - especially compared to the $149-$499 they get per Office license.

> They still have some ground to make up on the $1B or so dropped on the Kin.

Did they really spend $1B on the Kin? Do you have a breakdown on what they spent that much money on?

One report says Microsoft spent $500 million acquiring Danger as part of the Pink/Kin project. http://gigaom.com/2008/02/12/how-much-did-microsoft-pay-for-...

$500M spent to buy Danger in 2008 plus assumption of debt and the $260M write down they later took on discontinuing the Kin in 2008. So probably around $.75B - that is still a ton of phone licenses they would need to sell to recoup.

And that isn't even taking into account the R%D spent on the Windows 7 phone, which they are said to spend $400M on marketing for.

If Apple was only selling OS licenses for the 14M iPhone4's it shipped at MS's price, they would only have made $112M-210M in revenue.

http://gorumors.com/business/microsoft-kin-revenue-loss/6154... http://techcrunch.com/2010/08/26/microsoft-half-billion-doll...

Well, there's a 30% cut of the Marketplace sales but that's not going to amount to much as well.

However, they're building out a platform and asking for profits with the first quarter of sale is too much.

Microsoft always plays for the long haul, think about initial versions of Windows, XBox. On Xbox lost a ton of money initially but now is definitely profitable and making back the money spent.

Investing in Windows Phone is better for MS than just sitting on tens of billions of cash. It's good for us because it fosters competition even if you use other platforms. With your kind of thinking, no project would even get a start.

They're in this the same reason Google is... ad revenue. Money on licenses may be to help keep OEM skin in the game.

Related, but not quite the same, is something I learned at my first startup. Don't do enterprise pilots for free. Without some skin in the game the enterprise is a lot less likely to assist in making the pilot work. When there's even a small fee, they seem to be a lot more willing to view it as something they also need to make work.

I wonder if that number includes giveaways? I recall they gave away approx 100K phones to Microsoft employees alone.

IIRC, it was actually an option to purchase a WP7 phone and get a full refund from the company. Essentially the same thing, but there are plenty of people who haven't exercised the option and are sticking with WM6.x or other devices for the time being.

Edit: The giveaway was also different between each branch of MS, EU was handled differently than the US.

I think it was even worse- I think if they signed a 2 year contract with a carrier, they got a refund on the subsidized price of the phone (which is usually a trivial amount).

I think MS has around 90k employees globally, and that includes everyone, not just engineers. So 100k sounds a little high.

I've one :) got because of BOGO deal. Samsung Focus's screen is awesome the SuperAMOLED really shows anyone who sees it really likes the screen and that includes iPhone and Nexus owners and others.

Marketplace really is not there, the apps are junk and even the marketplace app itself is slow to load on cellular connections and it really shows. the search is pathetic it seems they intentionally show you the songs along with apps even if all I want is apps

MS needs to update the OS and they need to do it fast and frequently otherwise in next six months to year they'll be out of this game forever

> MS needs to update the OS and they need to do it fast and frequently otherwise in next six months to year they'll be out of this game forever

There's an OS update on the way :)

I have the HTC Trophy from Vodafone here in New Zealand, I really enjoy the UI, for some reason it really clicks with me compared some the other smartphones.

As a developer my biggest gripe is the limited access to some of the phone features, the largest one being the limited API for Live Tiles which clearly is one of the major selling points for the WP7.

Good for them.

Yes, we can speculate on whether this is marketing FUD or real numbers but the bottom line is that MS made a good product that is helping to innovate the mobile space by increasing competition.

Microsoft can't build the kind of developer community that Google and Apple have. The interface is smooth, and the Zune Pass is great, but there has to be more.

Can't build? Why not? Developers in general love their tools (Visual Studio), the language has a huge user base (C#), and they're leveraging a rapidly maturing framework (Silverlight).

If anything, when it comes to getting developer mindshare, it seems like Microsoft has a huge leg up.

Microsoft is the development platform of choice for big business. The hottest startup to use their stack in recent memory is StackOverflow. Generally speaking hackers choose not to use Microsoft's platform when they have a choice. Personally I use c# at my day job, but I barely considered building something for the WP7, and am instead working on iPhone and Android.

Wow, that's a big warehouse full!

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