“The facts get ever worse about the Microsoft Windows Phone strategy for Nokia and its Lumia line of smartphones,” Tomi Ahonen writes for Communities Dominate Brands. “We have just seen the brand new market share numbers from the UK by Kantar Worldpanel. And first, here is the ‘logic’ of the Windows Phone strategy for Nokia. The assumption was, that while Symbian sales saw a gradual erosion of market share (a couple of points of market share per year lost), if new CEO Stephen Elop stepped in while Nokia was still on top, and quickly changed the operating system away from the declining Symbian to another (could have been Nokia’s own Linux based and open source MeeGo or Google’s also Linux based and also open source Android or the proprietary and very closed Microsoft Windows Phone), he could stop the bleeding and stabilize the Nokia smartphone market share.”
“I wrote on this blog a year ago, that I expect[ed] year 2012 to see a 1 to 1 conversion, as Symbian declines, the Windows Phone (ie Lumia) smartphones by Nokia will replace them. For every Symbian lost there will be 1 for 1 a Windows Phone gain by Nokia,” Ahonen writes. “That was a reasonable assumption. That is now proven not to be true. Nokia lost one third of its last remaining loyal customer base, when trying to force them to take Lumia smartphones over the past five months.”
Ahonen writes, “So also, we have very interesting views to Microsoft. Its not that Nokia somehow needed Microsoft to survive, clearly the Microsoft strategy is suffocating Nokia and killing its customer relationship. But look at Microsoft in the past year and a half, according to the Kantar numbers. Look how massively Microsoft is collapsing without Nokia. It really is true, that Nokia is Microsoft’s last gasp in mobile and without Nokia Microsoft would have been eliminated from the game by now.”
Read more in the full article here.
[Thanks to MacDailyNews Readers “Dale S.” and “Wingsy” for the heads up.]
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