MG Siegler comments on Kindel’s post I linked to earlier today on Windows Phone and its inability to grow in today’s smartphone market. I want to add some remarks to a few of Siegler’s quotes.
Two to three years in the hole, the only way Windows Phone can win the market now is to make a product that is leaps and bounds better than what’s out there. They need something that’s an iPhone-in-2007 type product. The product they have, while good, isn’t that.
I don’t think Windows Phone needs to win the market. It just needs to be successful, and one doesn’t gain success by the failure of others. If it slowly grows as I suspect it will, the success should come over time. Android was able to grow faster because there was no other competition to the iPhone when it launched. Windows Phone is good now and it will only get better.
I just think the main Windows Phone problem is a lot more simple than Kindel wants to believe. He blames carrier marketing — yadda, yadda. Microsoft has all the money in the world; if it was just a marketing problem, they could fix that.
This is Microsoft, we’re talking about — the company that promoted Windows 7 Launch Parties in 2009. Boat loads of cash can’t fix bad marketing. You need good marketers to fix bad marketing, and Microsoft has never had that. So I do think marketing is a considerable amount of the problem. Consider all the Android phone advertising you see versus all the Windows Phone advertising. No comparison.
You can’t overlook being two to three years late to the market. And as a result, having essentially no third-party developer support. This does matter.
Yes it does matter, but at the same time it’s not a deal-breaker, at least not in my opinion. Windows Phone has thousands of apps. People that buy the phone are probably a little disappointed by the fact that it doesn’t have nearly as many as iOS or Android, but they already paid for the phone at that point, and is anyone really returning a phone because of a scarce app selection?
Unfortunately, apps are a hard problem to fix. App developers only want to make apps for popular platforms, yet nowadays platforms can’t really get that popular without tons of apps. But this comes back to marketing. If Microsoft could spin this by saying that they have the best quality apps (whether they do or don’t) and that quality matters over quantity, it might help consumers see things from a different perspective. But no one is marketing Windows Phone in a way that truly stands out.
