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Comment by gouranga | Hacker News Reader

I'm sure it will. WP has superior features to BlackBerry OS (esp Facebook, twitter integration, messaging) and the devices are cheaper than comparable Blackberry, Android and iOS devices. Market share is also finally growing.

It's a killer platform already - they just need to sort out the marketing and get through all the Android/iOS fanboy FUD out there against it.

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Globally, WP isn't large enough yet to register on Statcounters global metrics, but:

* In NA, 1.0% to 0.97% drop from May to June: http://gs.statcounter.com/#mobile_os-na-monthly-201106-20120...

* In Europe, 1.23% to 1.36% rise from May to June: http://gs.statcounter.com/#mobile_os-eu-monthly-201106-20120...

Stats from Netmarketstats shows a much larger global decline, so I think we can conclude that WP is barely growing it's overall marketshare. I expect the WP8 announcement (rather, the WP7.8 announcement) will lead to reduced sales until WP8 is released (hopefully) later this year.

As for Android/iOS fanboy FUD, what exactly would you be referring to?

Statcounter is a horse shit merchant. It's a bad choice for measuring market share statistics for anything. Let's take a look at this specific case and why it's wrong:

1. A lot of WP devices announce themselves as IE desktop rather than mobile.

2. People in the EU still primarily use them for messaging, email only. I rarely see people "on the web" on their mobile devices.

3. Apps requests do not necessarily count in the statistics and the majority of the time people spend is in apps (WP has native FB, ebay, Twitter apps etc). WP has decent native apps for pretty much everything.

The only thing that matters statistically are sales and retention which are numbers that are not uniformly available for any platform.

Re: fanboy FUD is the inevitable "Windows Phone sucks" mantra from people who have never even set eyes on a device.

So your basis for "marketing share growing" is a Comscore report based on a survey in the United States? The only way you would know how many WP are sold is you work on certain parts of WP at Microsoft. I know someone who does, and, although no specific numbers were given, he gives off the impression that WP growth has not been good, and that the Lumia launch was, to put it nicely, disappointing.

And the inevitable "<insert mobile platform here> sucks" mantra comes from fanboys from every platform, including WP. Care to explain why that FUD hasn't influenced the growth of iOS and Android?

Market share is also finally growing.

I've been hearing the opposite. Where are you reading this?

http://www.businessinsider.com/finally-microsoft-has-stopped...

Inevitably, they put the reverse spin on it because it's trendy...

Also, you've got to call bullshit on the stats as the widely deployed Nokia Series 30/40 phones are still the most ubiquitous worldwide

Interesting. If MS starts making any real headway in the market I think that's really going to shake up the native app businesses. People are suffering enough already writing Android and iOS apps. A third platform is probably going to drive a lot of people to the web.

Spot on. WP has good web integration as well i.e you can pin web sites to the start screen so there's a good opportunity there to bridge the gap.

Growing 0.1% from last quarter is hardly "growing" or any indication about a bright future ahead of it. What happens if next quarter they are down again since I assume even fewer people will want to buy Nokia's Lumia now that they know it won't be upgraded to WP8?

99% of people don't know or care. At least in the UK, we're buying tonnes of them. 3 months ago, iPhones everywhere in our office. Now all I see is "sent from my windows phone" all over emails :)

I know 5 people who've binned iPhones for Lumia 710/800 handsets on contract renewal citing that the iPhone is clunky.

(I will say I got rid of my Lumia 710 recently and replaced with a basic phone but that's not really because the OS or the device suck).

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