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Nov 9

9:23 am

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WP7 Strategy Confusion

I’m struggling to understand Microsoft’s Windows Phone 7 strategy.

The WP7 ads make it clear that the current batch of smartphones are either ridiculously inefficient or annoyingly narcissistic and addictive. So, these new WP7 phones are for people who don’t want to spend much time on their phones.

But why would a potential customer pay for a two hundred dollar phone — plus a pricy service contract — if they’re not going to use it very often? With a similar price structure to more capable and established iOS and Android devices, is UI convenience and distinctiveness going to make up the difference? Doubtful.

Third-party developers are being encouraged to port their iOS and Android apps to the WP7 platform. This makes perfect sense, since smartphones are app platforms and an app platform’s success is based on the value of its third party app catalog.

But why would a developer port or create an app for WP7 if the phone’s target market is the set of customers who don’t want to spend much time on their phones and are likely to be smarting from the phone’s initial price. How are developers expecting to make money from the low-app-usage crowd?

Clearly, these factors combined are not going to propel WP7 to iOS or Android levels of success. Likely, Microsoft understands this and is willing to stay in the smartphone software market for the long haul. If Microsoft pursues smartphones the way they pushed into gaming consoles, WP7 developers shouldn’t be disappointed by early sales figures and should stick it out for a year or two.

My point here isn’t that Microsoft is behind Apple and Google with mobile software, or even that Microsoft doesn’t know how to market their products. That’s all been said quite a bit more eloquently for the past few months all over the web.

My point is that it’s the synthesis of these fundamentally incompatible tactics:

  • market to current feature phone customers
  • price like iOS and Android smartphones
  • alienate third party developers

which assures that WP7 won’t reach short term success.