Analyse This (WP7 predictions and the appropriate response)
So there’s another official analyst information “release” about Windows Phone 7. Digitimes Research has concluded that, among other findings, Windows Phone 7 will have a 6.2% marketshare by the end of 2012. Now, Windows Phone faithful out there, before you even begin to well up with emotion about this there is another report saying that Nokia’s Lumia 800, despite being perched as a bestseller on several websites, has all but gone belly up in Europe. There’s even a website that claims total European penetration by the Lumia is sitting at a fraction of a percent.
For those confused, let’s also be clear that Gartner predicted that WP7 would fail miserably and also blow up like a frozen turkey in a deep fryer with less than six months time span in between both predictions. If we travel back further, we see people at Bloomberg proclaiming the iPhone would fail. Analysts seem to have entirely too much trouble doing the job they’re paid to do. If a janitor at your job just never seemed to be able to mop up more than half of the messes, why would you continue to pay him?
As a Windows Phone 7 early adopter and full time user, I myself would love nothing more than to see it become a viable and stable ecosystem based upon a rock-solid OS. I want it to absorb more marketshare not because of some mindless fanboy cheering, but for my own well being in knowing I’ve invested money into apps on a phone ecosystem that won’t suddenly turn into vapor a few years down the line. What I will not do, and what I keep seeing other websites doing, is giving credence and even putting their faith in people who get paid to be right, when they’re only right about half as much as they’re expected to be.
As a community (not only WinPho7 but iOS and Android fans as well), we like to eat up news stories about our platform of choice. This, to us, is just another sports team to root or our own technocratic election; The votes we cast are money. While involvement is encouraging, giving these “findings” anything more than a cursory glance would be doing us all a disservice.
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The smartest thing we didn’t think of doing may have been saying WP will be #2 by 2015.
People think I would be happier in life if WP was called off altogether or, if it were possible, lose significant market share. That’s just false. The thing that gets my attention is how full of shit you people (by you people I mean the majority of our audience and the overwhelming majority of our vocal audience who will summarily say nasty things to me here) are.
Take these polls and analysts for instance. WP will be up 6.2% by whenever, whoopie! NPD is awesome! What’s that? TheStreet says only 41K phones sold on the launch? Those lying bastards are trolling for pageviews!
Seems to me the best way to win you people over is not to write something that isn’t superlative about sales performance and market share growth down the line. All you gotta do is reblog some bullshit poll and watch out for the stampede of fanatics because they’re chasing you down to thank you for sharing the truth and, parenthetically, Android sucks. In the mood for a challenge? Find a trafficked WMPU article discussion that doesn’t mention Android. Someone who did business with Android is getting sued? Praise the Lord! You’re obsessed.
WP is awesome, period. I know because I tried it. One of you who knew it was so awesome mailed me one knowing I would agree and hopefully shut up a little (he was half right).
And to its credit, that platform sure knows how to attract a fiercely loyal, albeit small, crowd.
So, how good is WP doing? Well I want to snatch top post so I’ll get back to you shortly with actual solid data.
Good stuff Anthony.
How good is it doing? Well its marketshare is increasing ever so slowly. You won’t hear me say they’ll be at 15% marketshare within the year. What I will tell you is that the more aggressive they are the larger the marketshare will be.
What I will say is that WP will gain marketshare globally, the tougher trek will be the US Market.
In any case WP isn’t going anywhere anytime soon. How about this Simmons, lets wage on who will be along longer. RIM produced BlackBerry devices or WP. You know where my money is at.
They’re finally out of the ‘other’ market share, but I’m sure that’s mostly due to the implosion that RIM has become.
MS needs to figure out how to successfully market a product if they want more market share though. Just my $.02
Maybe you’re confusing market share with new users.
Looking over the past six months there has been somewhere between very marginal and absolutely zero growth in Windows Phone market share.
Globally.
Think they’ll get a holiday bump? Me too, along with the competition.
There’s been no significant Nokia bump. No Mango bump. Same old sideways…
Assuming you don’t count the brands morphing like Windows Phone to Windows 8 or Blackberry to Whiteberry, versus just being essentially abandoned like the Kin and Sidekick because no one wants them and no one wants to continue trying to make people want them, as WP not being around longer, given that I don’t think either will disappear anytime soon, as in this decade, it won’t be a very exciting bet, I’d rather close the tab and settle up, or sit on it until you offer me something better on which to double down.
You and D-Money, whom I also owe.
Well you got to start somewhere Chris. I think MS has found out how to market and thats to let the OEMs take care of it. That is light years ahead of their advertising agency because those guys are horrible.
Nokia gets advertising. Not just in terms of commercials but drawing attention to the product.
Another huge problem is the limited availability of WP handsets on multiple carriers. Well over 50% of the US smartphone market don’t even have access to a 2nd Gen WP device which are light years better than 1st Gen hardware. I’m glad Verizon has spelled out what they need to see happen. Now its time for Microsoft to call their bluff and produce LTE phones. The next 6 months will be very telling.
Here’s a thought.
Maybe Microsoft figured out a while ago that a one percenter in the mobile market is worth having, and worth what they’ve been paying to have it, but the money it would take to turn it into a ten percenter would produce an X-fold greater return if it were invested into Y instead, which is already delivering Z hundreds of millions each month in profit.
Or .. let’s funnel almost all of our heavy-lifting resources into one longshot basket at a time, and that basket is Bing, with a few bucks left over to keep WP rolling, or puttering along rather.
Think on that.
Doug, there really hasn’t been much data on sales from the Mango bump, Nokia sales figures, or anything. It’s all speculation, and when one website says one thing another one claims another.
It’s…. all stupid. Until Q42011 figures are actually released…
Exactly. Unless someone is just being a douche its only reasonable to wait for updated figures that reflect the period where 2nd Gen Windows Phones were being sold.
The only phone we know that could go a year without being updated and still sell is the iPhone. Now that there will be regular, more frequent WP device releases I think it’ll be a better indication on the appeal of Windows Phones.
So Anthony, you’re still hanging around for a presumably-unflubbed Microsoft annual report to clear the air on just how badly WP is failing? They already have to write a dozen pages on their litigious situation, there isn’t much room left for the unimportant things, let alone the failures.
Everyone said last year Oh just wait until Q4 for MS to report the official numbers. Never happened. Same thing, just wait for the quarterly, never happens. Last time I checked they made some vague allusion to sales but that’s it. So for you to present that prospect as the way to go to get solid data, from the source that doesn’t report it (and in the past has fudged numbers), I don’t know what to tell you Anthony. You seem like a smart guy to me, but then you go say something like this.
Me, I get my numbers from the very same place Surur does and I believe in their relative reliability just as much as he does, even though he and I are on very opposite sides of the aisle: Facebook’s API for scraping client usage data and how do you like that.
Sounds a little crazy, doesn’t it, but maybe now if you sort of think the two over, combing Facebook’s server logs versus waiting for Microsoft to maybe say something, well, I’m right on this.
Well, no, I’m not hanging around waiting for Microsoft to say anything. The Facebook data is all well and good for US figures, but overseas sales can dictate the survivability and viability of the platform as well, especially since the OEM’s are international corporations.
Basically, I’m waiting for something more concrete, but I’m also not stupid enough to think MS will release data that makes them look bad.
I’ll grant you that the Facebook data may not be great for data on Mainland China but Facebook, I believe, has done a good job catching on throughout the world.
But you want something more concrete huh. Like what? The vibe you get from how many people you see on the subway using this and that? Because I ride the subway all the time and if anything the Facebook data overstates the prevalence of WP.
Not sure why you’re grasping for more seemingly trustworthy and solid data than random analysts, familiar name analysts and me with my Facebook nonsense. Even the diehard fanatics have given up contesting that WP continues to be and has always been a flatlined DOA flop. They’ve moved on to trying to come up with whom to blame.
Here I’ll get you started. Most seem to go with the carriers for not forcing salesmen to push the phones, for not “educating” them well enough. Others blame advertising. Some blame Android stealing would-be customers by having stolen Microsoft intellectual property. Some blame Microsoft for prioritizing their patent racketeering operations at the expense of turning WP into a success, or not taking advantage of it for leverage to launch the platform into success by forcing it down the throats of the likes of HTC and Samsung.
You want my take on it? I blame the name.
Windows 8 will have the Metro ui as the default interface. MS is taking the long view with WP7 –it will have more marketshare by Win8 release, and will gain much more traction after that.
Anthony, take close note of what RickH did right there, a classic Microsoft mobile apologist move after concession of failure — “Just you wait until the next big thing, they’re just surveying the scene right now, positioning for the kill which they’ll get in X months or so, just you wait.”
That’s another angle you could take. Works year after year after year. Timeless.
I agree, Anthony. Yours is the appropriate response.
The biggest thing I agree with RickH said is that MS is playing long ball. I never said I believe MS will succeed, however, and at this point you’d have to be crazy to say they’re doing anything but struggling to keep their heads above water, having their userbase expanding at the same rate the market is.
He has a point about the Metro interface, but it’s a point that only time will tell if it’s relevant. As of right now I’m at the point where I hope somebody knows that they’re doing.
Also, the US has about half of all the people on Facebook while only having 4% of the worlds population. So, it’s not just “mainland China” that has a disproportionately small amount of users. Only 2% of the entire planet outside of the USA uses Facebook, and the highest country with use per capita outside of the USA is Indonesia with a whopping 17% of the country on board, or roughly 44 million people. India is next, with an astounding… 4.4%.
So yeah, using Facebook as an international marker of WP7 sales is pointless, despite its use for measuring those from the States.
If by 2% you meant 35%, you’d be less full of baloney. There’s plenty of overlap to use this data on wp, especially relative to itself, as a barometer of its adoption or lack thereof. If there were a better one I would be using it instead.
WinPho is on the list of things that managed to flame out in addition to flopping. It’s share growth teetering on attrition.
Maybe you were just being figurative, but I’m glad to see you know how to slip a key figure that’s off by twentyfold into an argument about the pursuit of truthful statistics.
Still in agreement with him Forestall?
I’m the guy who didn’t just bullshit you. He must be the other guy.
There are 150 million people in the world outside of the USA that are on facebook. That’s out of over 6 billion people.
Facebook has a penetration rate of 2% outside the USA. http://www.socialbakers.com/facebook-statistics/
Please to be backing up your 35% statistic.
And yes, that includes users from third world hellholes like Ethiopia and Haiti.
Oh, my bad. Apparently it’s listed at 10% here.
Still, well below your supposed 35% figure.
http://www.internetworldstats.com/facebook.htm
Hey, anyone using the stock android browser on gingerbread, is it crashing on you when you start to type a comment here under the mobile theme?
The most accurate way to count WP7 users is probably counting people who actually are receiving ICS, then multiplying that by four.
Anthony I like that you actually think you’re know what you talking about in spite of evidence surrounding you to the contrary, it makes for better content.
That said, if you google “facebook usage by country” you get stuff like this:
“More than 75% of users are outside of the United States”
http://www.facebook.com/press/info.php?statistics
US Country audience 157.4m which is 65.80% of percent of global audience according to this site, top google return, very high postrank:
http://www.checkfacebook.com/
Moving down the list, this guy who sounds kind of smart affirms those numbers by country:
http://www.nickburcher.com/2011/07/facebook-usage-figures-by-country-july.html
Further affirming, this site comes up with 167m or 48% for North American use: http://www.internetworldstats.com/facebook.htm
Here’s a Guardian article. Old data, from 2010, but it affirms my 35% a lot more than your 2% figure.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/blog/2010/jul/22/facebook-countries-population-use#data
Maybe we’re not talking about the same thing? I think you said something like 98% of facebook users are in the United States, something like that, and therefore, because the Windows Phone activity is brewing elsewhere possibly, Facebook data is useless in sizing up whether or not WP is a huge success.
November was a better month for WP based on the data I use (versus your data which is made up of optimism and patiently waiting for something to show up that tells you what you want to hear or, sorry, looks solid or official or whatever).
It was also a better month for Android.
Good point about ICS, good point. I heard NoDo finally is on most devices. You got Android beat there. It’s just weird that with your Mango and your Tango and your Nokia and your standardized chassis and your fruity tiles that no one’s buying your phone. I did see one lady in Starbucks maybe four months ago who had one though, to offer full disclosure. But of the thousands of phones I’ve glanced at both on the streets of the city and subway and everywhere else I’ve been since its launch, I have seen but one phone in the wild. And I do make an effort to keep my eyes open to see who’s running what.
I wasn’t cherrypicking those links. All from the first SERP on google for the thing you google for if you want this information, facebook usage by country. Please tell me I misunderstood you because even without a bunch of links we come up with to refute the other, for you to figure that only 2% of the people on Facebook right now are coming from overseas, a service that has a global audience in the neighborhood of a billion (there are fewer than 98 billion people in the States btw) as I suspect you know given that you’re all techy, … man.
Doug, let’s clear it up:
I corrected the 2% figure. There are 800 million people in Facebook, or roughly 12% of the worlds TOTAL population.
150 million of the 700 are in the USA. That means the US has under a quarter of the total Facebook users. This is disproportional as all hell from actual population numbers, in which the US currently has 5% of the worlds pop but 20%+/-
100 million people use some form of mobile Facebook regularly.
I just want to be sure we’re on the same page here before going any further.
I meant 800, not 700 as I have in the 2nd part. My bad!
Why do you still root against WP so fervently? I believe because you have built your audience on that shtick and are so invested that you are now at the point where you believe your own BS. Kinda like those right wing talk show idjuts who will bash Obama on general principle no matter what.
Btw, the Titan is God’s phone…
D-Money, the same could not be said for the things that go down in almost every thread on WMPU?
I am not against WP’s success. I am a little against people both bullshitting themselves and lashing out against the other guys in the midst of their storm bullshit.
Cross my heart D-Money, I want WP to succeed.
But what I want and what will happen with respect to that, as you damn well know, are quite different.