The End Of The Windows Phone

The End Of The Windows Phone

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Well it seems the inevitable death of the Windows phone is nigh as the latest figures from Gartner are released. "Global sales of smart-phones to end users totalled 432 million units in the fourth quarter of 2016, a 7 percent increase over the fourth quarter of 2015. The fourth quarter of 2016 saw Apple leapfrog past Samsung to secure the No. 1 global smart phone vendor position."

The interesting figure is that in the 4th  quarter of 2016 phones sold with the Windows operating system, as a percent of market share stood at 0.3%.

2016 4th quarter sales of smart phones

Source: Gartner (February 2017)

However even though those figure look pretty dire it seems that the Redmond giant is not about to give up on its mobile platform. "Discover what's next for Windows 10 Mobile for phones and small tablets" This is the title of the Youtube video below that professes to shed some light on the future of Microsoft Mobile. It is worth remembering that sales do not necessarily reflect market share. If you assume Microsoft have been selling that number of devices every quarter since the launch of Windows 10 Mobile then that would put about 6 million devices in the market. So its still a pretty big platform and a large target audience / market.

 

Microsoft is also still pushing forward with some big Continuum developments with a report from Mary Jo Foley at ZDNet claiming that Microsoft is aiming to build in x86 emulation into an ARM64 device. Obviously this would mean that the phone could run desktop apps, obviously it would need hooking up to a monitor but hey, then you really do have a really small laptop!

Some Interesting Microsoft Facts
Microsoft's global revenue $85.3bn    
Microsoft's net income $16.8bn    
Microsoft's expenditure on research & development $11,988m    
Global market share of Win7 40.7%    
Number of Windows 8 licenses sold worldwide 200m    
Household penetration of PCs 93%    
Global unit sales of Xbox 360 0.31m  

Microsft Research and Development

One of the business endeavours that you can totally rely on Microsoft for is for them to develop new products and open doors. They redevelop existing ideas, improving them and repackaging them. Microsoft has a tenacious appetite towards development, and they just do not stop. This was likely the legacy of Steve Ballmer who was famous for err... "developers". There is no way that they will allow the Windows phone to die. No matter what the statistics say, no matter what the competition. You can bet that they will continue to throw the "curve ball" into the marketplace and that they will come up with new and innovative products. We are of course big fans of Microsoft, but then again who isn't? Lets not forget Hololens 2

Article Written By Restore Solutions : March 3rd, 2017.