Despite entering a crowded market, Microsoft’s brand-new Windows Phone operating system seems off to a healthy start. Nonetheless, the estimates aren’t impressing cynical tech journalists.
The Street’s Scott Moritz cites a market-research source who claims Microsoft shipped a “mere 40,000 Windows Phone 7 phones Monday.”
“The anemic sales number does not include the 89,000 Microsoft employees that will be given free Windows 7 phones,” Moritz quips.
CNET reporters added their bleak perspective based on the performance of a single AT&T store in San Francisco (where every hipster in sight is already fondling an iPhone), which sold fewer than 20 Windows devices by midday.
“If Microsoft hopes to get back in the smartphone game, it had better hope that Windows Phone 7 makes a bigger impact than it appeared to be having at one AT&T store here,” they wrote.
But let’s put this into perspective. Google claims it’s shipping at least 200,000 Android phones every day, and Apple says 270,000 iPhones are sold each day. However, comparing these numbers to a Windows Phone 7 launch estimate would be foolish: Android has been on the market for two years, and the iPhone for three: Both platforms have reached critical mass.
Windows Phone 7 is two days old. That’s 5 x 10-3 years.
A fairer comparison would be launch numbers. The first iPhone shipped 250,000 units during its launch weekend, according to an analyst’s estimates. That number seems more substantial, but this was when nothing like the iPhone was already on the market.
I couldn’t find firm launch sales for the first Android phone (the T-Mobile G1), but the more popular Droid smartphone was estimated to ship 100,000 units during its launch weekend. That’s a full weekend, not one day — and if 40,000 more Windows phones shipped on day two, then Windows Phone 7’s launch would have performed nearly as well as the Droid.
If you consider that Windows Phone is entering a market where everyone and their mother already seems to be cradling an iPhone or an Android phone, a 40,000 day-one estimate isn’t bad. (It’s certainly better than Google’s failed launch of the Nexus One, which sold 135,000 units over 74 days, according to an estimate.) Sure enough, AT&T and T-Mobile spokespeople contacted by Wired.com said their companies were pleased with early demand of Windows Phone 7 handsets, though they declined to disclose figures.
This all makes the pile of “doom and gloom” stories about Windows Phone 7 look silly (as was the case with the “iPhone is doomed” stories.)
I personally think Windows Phone 7 is going to be huge in two years — largely because Microsoft’s mobile strategy is superior to Android’s, as I argued in a previous piece. But no one should have realistically expected Windows Phone to blow anyone out of the water on day one, this late in the game.
Don’t get me wrong: I’m not cheering for Microsoft. But my point is we shouldn’t be projecting failure on anyone trying to push something new into the highly competitive mobile space. I don’t want just two giants with complete domination again, do you?
Photo: Mike Kane/Wired.com
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