“Microsoft Corp. said its Windows Phone operating system may capture more than 20 percent of the smartphone market over the next two to three years with the help of hardware manufacturers and increased marketing efforts,” Cornelius Rahn and Ragnhild Kjetland report for Bloomberg.
“Forecasts by researchers Gartner and IDC, which expects a market share of about 20 percent in 2015, are conservative, said Achim Berg, head of Windows Phone marketing, in Berlin today,” Rahn and Kjetland report.
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Rahn and Kjetland report, “Microsoft, the world’s largest software maker, is betting that Windows Phone will retake market share lost to Apple Inc.’s iPhone and handsets running Google Inc.’s Android software… In April, Gartner forecast that the Android operating system will have the largest smartphone market share during the next four years, rising from 23 percent in 2010 to 49 percent in 2015. Apple’s iOS is predicted to grow from 16 percent to 17 percent, while Microsoft’s share will go from 4.2 percent in 2010 to 19.5 percent in 2015. IDC in June predicted that Microsoft may hold a 20.3 percent market share in 2015.”
Read more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: Depends on how Android fares in court and the juries are still out. If smartphone assemblers find Android is suddenly too costly to load into their devices, then they will turn to alternatives like Microsoft’s Windows Phone. Time, as always, will tell.
[Thanks to MacDailyNews Reader “Punchbowl” for the heads up.]