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Comment by sadiq | Hacker News Reader

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.

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?

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.

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

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.

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

Oops! You're right. Thanks.

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.

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?

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

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

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

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