| famousringo said: 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. |
I agree that some carriers currently pose a challenge for windows phone for the reasons you mentioned (while others are embracing it), however that blog/article is complete croc. It must have been writn by a former Nokia Symbian employee. It's just writen with 100% negativity towards windows phone, pretending like its Ron Paul of smartphones.
Truth is windows phones really don't sell that badly once carriers decide to sell them and consumer satisfaction rates are generally very high. Lumia 800 has been the best selling device on Finlands largest carrier for 2 months straight now, outselling the iPhone. HTC Radar was a top 3 seller for the holiday season as was Nokia Lumia 710 when it came out. HTC Titan sold very well for AT&T. I've listened to podcasts where AT&T people confirmed that Titan sold really well and above their expectations. It was sold out for most of early December.
In Canada both Rogers and Telus have said they are happy with Nokia Lumia sales so far.
In my opinion, Windows phone performs as well as it should in the current marketplace considering its limitations.
OEMs really haven't given their best designs to the platform(other than Nokia), carriers haven't embraced it fully due to reasons you mentioned above, the ecosystem is still in its infancy, prices have not come down as low as competition and the OS platform lacks some more robust features that the other 2 players already have.
But I do think that there have been some major wins for Microsoft with the Windows Phone in terms of design (specific use cases and integration design is great) and overall ecosystem control and polish that microsoft is currently enforcing is commendable . They just have to keep at it and work on the things they are currently trailing the competition.
Phone contracts are 2 years long and then the cycle repeats...
Some links with info I stated above -
http://winphone7news.blogspot.ca/2012/04/nokia-lumia-800-once-again-bestseller.html
http://mobilesyrup.com/2012/03/27/canadian-carriers-and-dealers-happy-with-nokia-lumia-sales/
