"[Eldar] Murtazin’s number – 674,000 Windows Phones sold [through Dec 2010] – is, well, really bad.
“In the first quarter of (2011) the difference between the supply and sales grew even more,” Murtazin wrote, as translated by Bing, “and this trend was observed in April.”"Yes, it took Android 6 months to reach its first 1M units SOLD, but that was off just one model - the G1 - that was slowly introduced into other nations, and that was nearly 3 years ago when the smart phone market was just getting its feet wet.
By contrast, WP7 had 10 phones in 8 nations within its first quarter of sales, end of last year.
Remember how Palm began using "shipped" volume to describe how it was doing in its SEC quarterly filings? That's what Microsoft did with their Q2-FY2011 (Q4-CY2010). If you read the transcripts of their Q3-FY2011 (Q1-CY2011) earnings call, they spend all of four sentences on the subject of WP7, none of which talks about growth for the quarter. In its quarterly SEC filings, it again makes no mention of quarterly growth of WP7 shipments nor sales, even while within the same division (Entertainment and Devices Division or EDD) it breaks out sales of XBox and Kinect devices.
If you look at Comscore's tracking for the US smartphone market, Microsoft actually LOST 1.3 percentage points between 2010-November and 2011-February.
And it makes sense why Microsoft was willing to pay over a billion dollars to tie in with Nokia, following on the internal reports of hemorrhaging market share. After all, the introduction of WP7 had no effect on the Microsoft's sliding market share.
This leads one to believe that WP7 sales are a massive failure. Question is, can Nokia help Microsoft, when that first phone isn't slated to be available until early 2012 (or late 2011 at best)? On the face of things, LG was not happy at all with its sales of WP7 phones back in January, suggesting that, "for tech guys like us [WP7] might be a little bit boring after a week or two." And my first criticism of WP7 (upon its release) was that it was a lousy GUI that was barely customizable.
So long as WP7's GUI is a bunch of information tiles, it'll suck. It doesn't take a genius to take one look at Apple's iOS and Android's Froyo / Gingerbread interfaces, to see that WP7 just plain sucks balls on the GUI side. Information tiles is the engineer's solution to simplifying data for a non-techie person...which is to say, it sucks balls.
UPDATE 5/4/2011: Canalys reports that WP7 shipments during Q1-CY2011 was about 2.5% of all smartphones, which means that the total market share of WP7 is rapidly shrinking.
I guarantee people in Redmond are panicking, and there is no doubt left that this is why they chose to leave out all data on shipments in their quarterly guidance from yesterday's earnings report.
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