The Street is reporting that the US Windows Phone launch is reported to be 40,000 phone sales. This is despite a $100m+ campaign. So on it’s launch day it’s less than 1/5 of the average day for Android or Apple. They note that releasing a phone on a Monday doesn’t help anything (Friday or Saturday is a better launch day). They also note that too many options of phones may have been confusing to consumers (man people are dumb). The problem probably would lies in the fact that consumers don’t get that a Windows Phone means it’s an operating system and not a singular phone (like an iPhone). Still, Christmas is looming so we’ll see what happens when more phones and buzz are in hands. Oh and of course, we have to find out if these numbers turn out to be accurate since they’re not verified numbers – it’s based on a market research source that tracks phone sales which means it’s speculation and filed under rumor. This does pressure MS to release some solid numbers though before the silence leads to a conviction.

Anyone out there think these figures are accurate? Feel free to speculate wildly in the comments.


  1. As a gesture of reciprocating your candor by posting this, I’ll keep my distance from this one.

  2. Jeff: Well I guess Microsoft figured they should shove all of their chips on top of New York City and Frisco rather than even it out across fine cities like Wisconsin’s Green Bay; but do you really think that made a huge difference were it in fact a mistake? What would you have done differently?

  3. With limited stock in stores I wouldnt be surprised at all. If you say you are launching a brand new OS and you are serious about it you dont send 2 devices to a store and call that a product launch. Whether its MS or the so called partners, they have really failed to give WP7 the start it needed. Quite possibly it has not even managed to outdo current WM sales, which is beyond sad.

  4. Bullshit Simmons you just can’t take any more flaming today.

    Bullshit efjay, even if you were right about there being a supply limitation (or one that wasn’t strategitic), Microsoft had plenty of time to chose and round up its partners and the right playbook. If you want to blame it on anyone, rather than blaming it on a saturated market with brand loyalties buttressed firmly (which is a good excuse), the buck stops on Microsoft.

    But not beat WM sales for that day? Really? Man… Well I’m sure it will slowly but surely climb to the top in spite of this misfired launch, whoever’s to blame, right?


  5. Agree with efjay.

    We have 2 ATT stores in our town. One of them had 1 Samsung Focus. The other had NONE!


    Luckily, I got the 1 and only phone in our town on launch day.


  6. Short supply, huh. Man. If you are pinning this 40K figure onto some supply issues that I’m only hearing about here, if there’s a white collar equivalent of criminal negligence, some indictments should be handed out.

    But that won’t happen because you’re wrong. If that played any roll at all it was nominal. And you know it.

  7. I stand corrected, Simmons is back for more heat!

    You know we really need to get to the bottom of this. Hey DK can you crowdsource this and fire up a poll of theories or explanations as to why it didn’t reach my 41K unit projection?

  8. I think it’s fair to remember that in Europe the phones were in short supply and sold out as well. S-AMOLED are in short supply and it seems lie HTC is having issues getting their phones out. Hell, LG wasn’t even ready for launch and Dell is still not out yet in the US. So it’s clear that there are some real supply issues here.

  9. Well, since both AT&T and T-Mobile both have sold out all their WP7 and I am unable to pickup one, I wouldn’t be surprise of supply shortage.

  10. Well, I posted about this weeks ago. I saw no WP7 commercials until last Wednesday. Droid and Iphone have commercials some times months ahead of time. Secondly, the commercials don’t show you what is exactly different about WP7. They just show some and the key word is some people stuck on their phones. That doesn’t mean they wouldn’t be stuck to WP7. It doesn’t explain the tiles are hubs, nothing! The worst part MS has been accused of trying to copy Apple, but this would be the part time to copy them. I mean verbatim: Show the WP7 screen, just the screen play some catchy music, start to scroll or swipe through the hubs. Hell don’t even swipe! Start to swipe and say something like no swiping required to get your info.

  11. I believe that WP will pick up steam and out sell previous WM numbers by 5 to 10 fold over the next year. But it won’t be due to the piss poor marketing campaign launched to date. I said it the other day, and will say it again, every one of the lazy asses in that department should be shown the door in the morning and let them sue for their vacation pay.

    Product unavailability is a double edge sword that can actually prove to be a benefit creating demand. Alla, Cabbage Patch dolls. I think as more people start talking about WP, along with the lame marketing strategy, interest will begin to grow. Hopefully supply can catch up quickly though cause people will only wait so long. Microsoft has a lot of catching up to do but they are on the right track.

    And who dis?, brand loyality is dead in America. Walmart took care of that. Sure, the 8 to 10% MAC users will always be drawn to the iPhone, but for everyone else, its a new day.

  12. Chris: It’s among the things we’ve been going on back and forth about, not just for bragging rights but for developer adoption. If you were a developer on the fence and just saw that 40K figure, which is extraordinarily low given at least my expectations and I’m not alone on that, would you be more or less inclined to dive into WP7? It’s significant. It’s also significant to us in forecasting a WP7 user demo.

    Murani: You mean like me. I said that first. :P

    jason: With you on that, the ads have been surprisingly weak. Maybe I’m DVRing too fast through the commercials but I’ve only seen two and they look like they were done by the guy who produced the AT&T Blackberry Torch ads which as I understand have fallen quite flat, they seem to advertise AT&T about as much if not more than the phone and I don’t even recall if they named the one phone they put on TV, let alone if they had more than one or if they had a new product line, … it was plain weak. All it made me was a little sympathetic to the fans.

  13. I will admit that I watch quite a bit of TV but have only seen a couple of WP7 commercials. I would like to know what they spent $100 million on?

  14. LIke Jimski I place full blame on Microsoft. Microsoft should have placed an order themselves for screens and made sure every OEM had the appropriate number to get stock produced on time.

    Secondly, I rather like the “Season of the Witch” and “Really” commercials but they both fail to show off the phones. That is the problem with having numerous devices. Microsoft treats all OEMs as equal when nothing in the world is equal. We had this discussion back when WP7 was first announced.

    Walk into the AT&T store and the display for WP7 doesn’t scream “premiere” attention. Yes they have a wall but so does the iPhone and also blackberry and Android. That what you get when you place everything into the hands of carriers. Personally, i’m on Sprint and can’t wait to get a hold of the HTC 7 Pro.

  15. It’s too early to predict anything. I don’t see AT&T promoting the handsets the way they promoted the iPhone. I don’t even see T-Mobile promoting the HD7 the way they promoted the G1. In any case, it’s too early in the game. Microsoft is still the underdog. Let’s see what happens a year from now when MS has updated the OS and new handsets are released.

  16. I don’t think even Microsoft can screw up the success of WP. The OS will eventually sell itself.

    I do think Microsoft’s advertising is absolutely worthless. Why buy 30 seconds and fill it with convoluted nonsense with annoying music and only 5 seconds featuring your product? Microsoft also failed to really explain why the phone is fundamentally different than the other OS’s.

    I also think Microsoft’s release was as confusing and drawn out as possible. Some phones available here, others there, some not available until this date and only in select stores and then only through the manufacturer. Dumb. Dumb. Dumb.

    I still think they should have made a deal with one or two carriers and produced one or two killer phone(s) with exclusive rights for a month. If the hardware is rock solid appealing it will sell like mad. Then a month later let anyone release any phone they want.

    Instead they open the doors with a bunch of similar handsets that have cons and pros all canceling out each other. None of them really appeal to everyone and so people are left with questions like, “Why is my carrier getting these stupid phones and that carrier is getting the one I want?”, and also “Why does that phone have this and not that?”.

    Bottom line is WP is going to succeed over time, partly because it is a OS with serious appeal with serious potential and Microsoft behind it. And partly because Microsoft realizes it must succeed for them to achieve their future goals and will do their best to keep it updated and relevant.

  17. Judging from yesterdays Microsoft’s Small and Midsize Business Event, AT&T is not doing a good job as the premiere partner. The event was co-hosted by T-Mobile. The lady from MS even referred to T-Mobile as the premiere partner. She backtracked when I and another guy queried her on AT&T.

    As for AT&T, they aren’t going to sell any WP7 phones if their stores are staffed by pro-Apple people. One guy looked like he might at any moment snap on a Nano and dance around the store. The store was a large store in a prominent shopping district, not some store in the hood. Microsoft probably would have been better spending money on getting a pro-MS person in every store if they wanted some play.

  18. I have to say that the supply issues are not imagined, at least here in Tampa I got the last of the three phones that they had in stock. Now I did not call all the stores around town, but at least the store I was at sold all three by 10:30.

    As far as placing the blame goes, there is plenty of it to go around. The whole AT&T as a premier launch partner was laughable. I would say Tmobile had the truly high end handsets, although I would not give up my Focus and its Super AMOLED display anytime soon.

    In the end there is no Steve Jobs pushing the rabid fans to get a new phone and as far as Android goes you make it seem like it was always a huge success. Aside from the iPhone all the other platforms have steadily built market share. Android did get a huge boost from the Droid campain, but again it also features a very fragmented GUI for now. I would say it is in its Windows Mobile stage. It will be interesting to see it evolve.

  19. arizona_sk: I don’t know about that. With exception to all the crap I’ve been throwing at you guys about WP7 I have seen nothing but praise, superlatively positive reviews. They got enough good reviews.

    Agreed on #1. I was in Times Square yesterday around 4pm, and as usual, in midtown Manhattan on a week day in the afternoon, here’s where the speedtest weighed in:

    Note the full bars and -79db signal strength. It’s been that way in the busier parts of Manhattan since the iphone showed up. I’m beginning to believe the theories that this is something that simply cannot be improved with 3G technology and it will stay like this, with AT&T, until they go LTE along with their customers, so years.

    There was no apparent effort on AT&T to market this aggressively. I saw more Blackberry Torch ads than WP7 ads which sucked. I didn’t even know T-mo had any wp7 phones, to illustrate their efforts. On the other hand, kind of puzzling why Microsoft didn’t run their own huge campaign without tying AT&T into their advertisements. Actually from the two I saw it looked like, as I said earlier, AT&T advertisements, that they’re the fastest 3G network or whatever and hey, new phone that you can see when dancing in a club so you’re more likely to get laid. That’s it.

    But if in fact this was due to terrible pre-launch promotion, that that is the main culprit being the poor sales should come as a relief because if you make something really good, the people will buy — eventually. But it’s just nice to get a boost from a successful launch day, generates buzz and kickstarts initial sales.

    I don’t get it. I thought they were going all out on this. Judging by the youtube clips David posted here, looks like the programmers went all out. Ballmer played it up frequently when holding a mic, writers/journalists identified this as Microsoft’s last stand in terms of getting into the mobile ring.

    Also with you on hardware. What’s up with this sd crap. If you don’t want the thing to be removable because there’s a chance it won’t be able to read well whatever someone stuffs inside, then hide the damn slot. And how about putting in something, hardware, that is a notch above the other guys? For example, 1.2GHz or dual core chip? Crazy amount of ram? SiriusXM receiver? Better dpi than the iphone 4? Class 6 32GB chips included in all phones? Just one of those, anything along those lines would have gotten the attention of a clump of people out there who know what that stuff means. “It’s the only device out there that has X.” Give people an opportunity to say that where X equals something other than the UI and Office this and xbox that. Superior hardware — why not. A lot on the line here.

    Based on what I’ve read here and elsewhere this sounded to me like an excellent product. And despite all the trash I talk, I never said it would suck, just stuff like everyone’s got stockholm syndrome. I recall saying I’d be very surprised if this not only wasn’t a good product (referring to the OS) but also fails to generate sales. Someone dropped a huge ball and the buck stops at Ballmer. He got the manpower behind it, they delivered apparently but he forgot about getting the world’s attention. Seems like bloggers did most of that job for him.

    Again, if it is a marketing thing versus, say, Microsoft being known for sucking at mobile devices or not known for making little communication things that were fantastic or the product not being good enough to generate positive reviews, then it may eventually pick up speed on its own.

    I keep running into articles (before this) about how Ballmer sucks and that he’s gotta go. Given that this happened on his watch and he was putting some resources and aggression into the people involved in its development and given that your launch day being huge can be an asset to chase hard and that Microsoft had the resources (cash) to chase it as hard as anyone could, starting to agree with those articles.

    All kidding aside, if I were you guys I’d be pretty pissed about this and unable to just shrug it off as being irrelevant to my own needs.

  20. Whether or not it is related to supply issues, MS has its task cut out for it. Here are some problems that I see:

    1. Microsoft may spend a lot of money promoting its OS, but it has to rely on the network in the end. I don’t see the HD7 or any mention of WP7 on T-Mobile’s front page. While AT&T has done a better job, it’s nothing like the marketing for the iPhone.

    2. When people can get Android phones that do more for the same price, why would they get a WP7 phone? And I’m not comparing the software here, but the hardware. HTC has come out with five lame phones. And while the Samsung Focus is decent, it’s no better than a Galaxy.

    3. Reviewers will never give MS a break. There was a time earlier this year, when WP7 was actually receiving rave reviews. What a difference a few months make. Most articles that I have seen about the OS over the last few days have been negative. What has changed? I don’t know. Maybe these people finally realized that it was a Microsoft product that they were dealing with.

  21. Well look at who suddenly decided to try to sound like an insightful contributor. Forget it Simmons, you dug your own grave with this crowd and interred yourself. So unless your that chick from Kill Bill 2, you ain’t getting out of that coffin. And even if you could you wouldn’t be able to resist at some point reverting back to your true self.

    *OR* you just successfully trolled me. I’ll give you the benefit of the doubt on that one. Well played.

    So, have any of you seen anyone else in public using a WP7 phone yet?


  22. Completely agree about the hardware issue. The only phones that come close is the Dell Venue Pro and Focus. The Dell purely for its build quality, not its hardware. Its hardware is actually a bit behind the times, not including the gorilla glass and metal construction of course. The Focus purely for its hardware and not its build quality which is as plastic as you can get with out “Tyco” stamped on it. Both have pros that outweigh the cons but neither of them scream BUY ME I’M THE BEST!

  23. I’m speaking directly about AT&T phones and the one independent (I still don’t count the Dell as a T-Mobile phone because T-Mobile doesn’t actually sell it). The HD7 is a phone that has that appeal but in my opinion its just another HD2.

  24. Yeah, you’re right, I cropped it vertically so it didn’t take up 800 pixels. If you’d like I’ll grab my wife’s camera and video my phone with the original screen shot on it. And if that’s not good enough, if you want me to go to Times Square with her camera and video a speedtest in HD (really hard to photoshop that), I would, under the condition that if the test sucks like I claim it did this time and many others you give me fifty bucks for unwarranted skepticism. Would you satisfy for the original with the exif data intact? Want me to take up a lot more space?

    What should I do, Josh?

  25. […] few days after WP7’s release in the States David K passed on a claim that the launch may not have even broken 40K units. The claim which originated from the street had no citation but it […]

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