Yes, how many Windows 7 phone units were sold to consumers?
We are talking several million dollars without a formal response. During the January Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, said a Microsoft executive e-Week that the company had never made a habit of complete release sales figures for Windows Mobile, the Smartphone platform to present more increasingly fragmented predecessor.
That being said, Microsoft’s two biggest rivals in the consumer-Smartphone space, Google and Apple, have made a habit of using sales numbers as competitive bludgeons. “[Google CEO] Eric Schmidt pointed out that they’re activating 200,000 units per day,” Apple CEO Steve Jobs told media and analysts during an Oct. 20 earnings call. “By comparison, Apple has activated 270,000 units per day, on average.” Since then, the two companies’ other executives have used similar metrics—always in the hundreds-of-thousands range—to paint their respective Smartphone platforms as unbeatable in the marketplace.
That intense focus on sales numbers, in turn, pressures Microsoft to show whether Windows Phone 7 is a hit with consumers—not to mention capable of justifying the hundreds of millions of dollars doubtlessly spent on development and marketing.
Yet in the three months following the smart phones’ rollout in the U.S. market, Microsoft has released just two sales metrics: In December, the company told journalists some 1.5 million Windows Phone 7 units had been sold by manufacturers to retailers; by Jan. 26 that number had risen to 2 million, as Bloomberg News confirmed with Microsoft.
When asked about the possibility of poor consumer-sales numbers, Microsoft points to research data suggesting some 93 percent of Windows Phone owners are either “satisfied” or “very satisfied” with the device.
An executive from one of Microsoft’s Smartphone partners, LG Electronics, told the blog Pocket-lint in a Jan. 14 interview that Windows Phone 7’s launch was “less than we expected.”
James Choi, a marketing strategy and planning team director for the manufacturer, said in the posting: “We strongly feel that it has a strong potential even though the first push wasn’t what everyone expected.” He offered no hard sales data, however. LG Electronics is one of the companies building the initial line of Windows Phone 7 devices, a roster that also includes Samsung, Dell and HTC.
A November report by TheStreet.com suggested some 40,000 Windows Phone 7 devices had sold Nov. 8, the platform’s first day of U.S. release on T-Mobile and AT&T. Microsoft did not confirm that number with e-WEEK, referring the question to the carriers.
If you take Microsoft’s 2 million units figure and divide by the 79 days since that Nov. 8 release, you arrive at an average of 25,316 units per day sold by manufacturers to carriers. If half of those eventually sold to consumers, it means Windows Phone 7 has sold a shade under a million units to consumers. If a third sold, that means around 666,666 units total.
Back in 2007, it took Apple’s first generation some 74 days to sell 1 million units. The Motorola Droid managed to sell 1.05 million in the 74 days following its November 2009 release.
“Our numbers are similar to the performance of other first-generation mobile platforms,” Achim Berg, Microsoft’s vice president of business and marketing for Windows Phones, mentioned in a Q&A posted Dec. 21 on the company’s corporate Website. “It takes time to educate partners and consumers on what you’re delivering, and drive awareness and interest in your new offering. We’re comfortable with where we are, and we are here for the long run.”
Meanwhile, a Face book page for the Windows Phone application has 366,099 monthly active users.
Currently available in GSM networks such as AT & T and T-Mobile, Windows Mobile 7 will appear on CDMA (Code Division Multiple Access) networks such as Sprint and Verizon in the first half of 2011. Before that time, Microsoft is expected to move software updates to increase the loading speed of applications and add functionality to copy and paste.
Microsoft is also making small your 7-related fires in recent weeks to Windows. In addition to reaching developers about to “jailbreak” the platform, the company also launched an investigation into a mysterious “data breach” affecting an unknown percentage of smart phones. In the latter case, Jan. 20, said the culprit was an application created by a third party not identified, apparently was sending relatively large amounts of data per day, sometimes between 30 MB and 50 MB in 24 hours.
