RIM, Windows Mobile and Symbian marketshare are looking worse according to Nielsen

[famousringo]

I just read a little anecdote which really drives home the point that carriers hate Windows Phone:

http://communities-dominate.blogs.com/brands/2012/03/disappointed-buyer-returned-lumia-salespeople-avoid-growing-nokia-retail-problem.html

"MTV3 the Finnish TV broadcaster and news service ran a secret test of the Finnish handset retailers in the Helsinki and Tampere regions (the two largest cities of Finland). They sampled two stores from each of the three mobile carriers/operators, and two stores from the two largest independent phone resellers. The MTV3 journalists pretended to be normal consumers and visited ten stores and every time asked to see Nokia Lumia smartphones. In six out of ten stores, the sales people showed only rival phones (Androids mostly by Samsung) when the 'consumer' asked for Nokia Lumia !!! In another two cases the sales person came with several phones rather than just the Lumia and offered immediately a series of handsets to compare. Only in two cases out of ten, did the sales person show a Lumia on first request. Every store had the Lumia on display and in stock and the news story makes the point, that in most stores Lumia had the biggest sales displays at prominent places."

Even in Finland, carriers are undermining the Lumia.

Why do the carriers promote Android over Windows Phone? Because Android gives the carriers power. They can slap their brand on the device, they can preload promotional apps, they can block or allow updates and modify the software as they see fit. Windows Phone takes all that away. The author of that article also points out that carriers hate the competitive threat of Skype, so there's another black mark.

The biggest challenge for Windows Phone is to either convince carriers to stop fighting it, or to get consumers so excited abut the product that the carriers won't matter.