Microsoft - Trouble In Smart Phones
December 31, 2009 |14:34 | News By : Team X
While everyone is debating over the relative merits of the latest smart phones from Research In Motion (RIMM), Motorola (MOT), Palm (PALM) and Apple (AAPL), phones running Microsoft (MSFT) Windows Mobile software are steadily losing market share.
In today’s WSJ, the Heard on the Street column takes a look at problem, noting that Windows Mobile phones had 7.9% of the smart phone market in the third quarter, down from 11.1% a year earlier. The piece concludes that Microsoft’s weak position “risks losing the chance to establish a stronghold in the mobile ecosystem,” which it says is “potentially a huge deal.”
The piece finds that Microsoft is at risk of repeating a mistake in the mobile sector that it made with the Internet: not recognizing a huge opportunity until it was too late to stake out a leadership position, and having to play catch up in a key market.
Microsoft has a new version of Windows Mobile in the works - version 7 - but that is still about a year away. For now it has to make do with Win Mobile 6.5, which is sort of the mobile equivalent of Vista - an OS few really like. With Vista, though, customers had few non-Microsoft choices. In smart phones, there are a plethora of choices. Which suggests Microsoft’s mobile market share is going to keep crumbling for now.
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