If you’ve been reading the recent news you might be forgiven for thinking that Windows Phone is in a very dire situation, and that Microsoft could even abandon it in the near future.
We reported that according to IDC, during the past quarter Microsoft’s mobile OS saw a somewhat significant decline in the number of phones that it shipped and consequently saw a decline in global marketshare.
Based on the same data, a number of major publications such as The Wall Street Journal, started claiming that not only was Windows Phone essentially dead – with other “financial investment” websites telling Microsoft to kill off the OS – but that there simply is no place for a third ecosystem in the smartphone market.
Let’s not mince words here, Windows Phone is doing terribly by most standards. According to IDC, Windows Phone now sits at only 2.5% of marketshare worldwide, a tiny spec compared to Android’s world-dominance at almost 85% and an unimpressive performance compared to Apple’s 12%.
It’s somewhat obvious that Microsoft never expected it to be this hard or take this long to break into the market, but let’s not forget this is the company that spent years losing money on what it deemed to be strategic projects such as Xbox and Bing.
But the real story here is that Windows Phone is not only here to stay for the foreseeable future, but it might just be on verge of going big. And the reason I’m saying this is that we’ve seen it happen before, quite recently in fact, and there’s little reason to doubt it will happen again.
What am I talking about? Android, of course, the Windows of the mobile world. Sitting atop its high mountain of money and Samsung devices; you might have forgotten that Android took quite a while before anybody started caring about it. And then it broke through and became the behemoth we know today. There are some indications that Windows Phone has a chance to do the exact same thing. But to see them, we need to take a look back through history.
Website: www.neowin.net
Images via IDC, Infotech, PrincessLeia, HTC.
