Bloomberg has an interesting piece today regarding Greg Sullivan’s announcement of Windows Phone hitting the 2 million milestone mark. Sullivan also told Bloomberg that satisfaction of the Windows Phone OS is standing at a fairly high 93%, while brand awareness is currently sitting at 66% of those surveyed by Microsoft.
Of course, the 2 million mark does only count the number of Windows Phone OSes sold (i.e. sold to device manufacturers), which doesn’t mean there are 2 million consumers walking around with WP7 devices. However, as many of the other numbers reported by Apple and Google are usually calculated in the same manner, it would be safe to compare these numbers with Apple and Google. Suffice to say, at Microsoft’s current standing and with how new WP7 really is, the numbers don’t compare too well with either Apple or Google.
The development market for WP7 continues to grow in strength as well. The Microsoft WP7 Marketplace currently has 6,500 applications available for WP7 (recently surpassing Palm OS and just 3,500 shy of RIM’s Blackberry OS) and 24,000 developers (including myself) have signed up to build applications for WP7.
Although Microsoft continues to say they are in the phone market for the long haul and will continue to update WP7 as time progresses, they aren’t too keen on telling users when they will update the phone. Plus, it appears that they are doing batch updates (sort of like service packs for Windows) instead of on the fly updates, which at this point are desperately needed. Especially, when recent issues of data usage have been creeping up of late.
The road looks long indeed for Microsoft’s mobile platform and whether they are truly in it for the long haul will definitely account a lot for how successful Windows Phone devices actually are. I continue to hope that Microsoft will start to update WP7 on a more regular basis as time progresses and not forget about it as they have, in my opinion, the Zune.
WinQuire 