Photo by Luca Sartoni
WHEN ELOP left Microsoft we predicted that he would be trouble and when he signed a deal with Microsoft we said it would be about patents. We were right. It was the same with Novell, which had its patents end up in Microsoft's belt. Here are the posts we wrote about CPTN before Nokia signed a deal with Microsoft:
When Microsoft launched Windows Phone a year ago, Microsoft proudly told the world that they shipped 2 million Windows Phone smartphones by HTC, Samsung and others. They soon were spooked, however, when the sales dwindled and dried up and stopped giving the sales breakdown. By the Spring, Microsoft insisted all Windows Mobile smartphones be counted together with Windows Phone - even as these two platforms are incompatible. And still the sales of 'the third ecosystem' kept falling, down to about 500,000 units by Q3. And early numbers from Q4 from Microsoft's best market, the USA, reveal that even more than a year after its launch, Windows Phone sales are still severely lagging its older and obsolete cousin, achieving only 1.4% or about 520,000 units. Windows Mobile meanwhile refuses to die, and in the USA achieved 2.4% market share of new sales according to Nielsen or about 890,000 unit sales.
Thus if you remember seeing a 'Microsoft' market share in smartphones somewhere near 2% for Q3, that includes the better-selling Windows Mobile, and the newer and supposedly better so-called 'third ecosystem; Windows Phone has far less than 1% market share globally.