Glad to hear it's doing well. Competition in the space is always a good thing, and Windows Phone is very usable, especially for smartphone newcomers. Never mind that, like its desktop compatriot, Windows Phone is bloody fast.
Windows Phone market share hits double digits in UK and France
Microsoft has been gobbling up market share in Europe, with nearly one in eight phones in the UK now running Windows Phone and one in ten in France. "Windows Phone's latest wave of growth is being driven by Nokia's expansion into the low and mid range market with the Lumia 520 and 620 handsets," said Dominic Sunnebo, strategic …
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Monday 30th September 2013 19:22 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: Maybe I'm just too old a fart and remember things that should've been forgotten...
Or not old enough to remember when MS was the competition to the Big Iron UNIX vendors and kicked them out of the datacentre for tasks they basically weren't suited for. Why would someone want to run a big UNIX server in order to serve files or run print jobs?
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Monday 30th September 2013 19:39 GMT James 100
Re: Maybe I'm just too old a fart and remember things that should've been forgotten...
How is a Windows server any better suited to that than a Unix one? Cheaper hardware, thanks to the higher volume, but a less reliable OS with restrictive licensing? (We were a mixed Solaris/NetWare shop in those days; NW was pretty good at the file/print handling, Solaris did everything else very nicely. Windows really didn't have anything to offer on either side.)
With hindsight, I really wish the Linux/BSD push had come that little bit earlier - a much more sensible migration path from proprietary Unixes. Still, it's doing pretty well these days...
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Monday 30th September 2013 21:15 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: Maybe I'm just too old a fart and remember things that should've been forgotten...
A Windows server was better because it was good enough and cheap as chips when compared to the Big Iron vendors. If you think MS licensing was restrictive you don't remember how much it cost to run UNIX. As for workstations, a Windows workstation running UNIX and Mainframe terminal software was so much cheaper than a UNIX workstation and much more usable than a dumb terminal. I had a Solaris workstation on my desk in the mid 90s, it cost £10k, a Windows workstation cost a few hundred quid and did everything we needed, so Solaris was given the boot from everything except database serving.
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Tuesday 1st October 2013 09:43 GMT Stuart Castle
Re: Maybe I'm just too old a fart and remember things that should've been forgotten...
Indeed. Anyone who thinks Microsoft are restrictive either hasn't dealt with a lot of the old Unix vendors, or has forgotten doing so.
I work at a Uni. When I was doing staff support, we had a lot of Sun workstations. These were admittedly lovely machines, but expensive to buy and maintain. I remember once I was attempting to fix one where the CDROM had died. It was actually a low end CD Rom drive (2x speed when the cheaper PC ones were up to 6 or 8x) with a slightly different interface. Sun wanted £600 for a new one. I've heard similar horror stories about Solaris licence costs which is presumably why a lot of the researchers who were using Solaris have moved over to PCs running Linux, or Windows.
I also heard, during my degree, a story about a little trick ICL used to pull on their mainframes. Apparently, they used to sell an "upgrade" that doubled the users storage. What did the upgrade consist of? The engineer came and flipped a switch that activated read/write heads on the other side of the disks..
While you can't freely distribute their software, compared to the old *nix/BSD workstation and mainframe vendors, MS are a paragon of openness and honesty.
MS saw people doing this. They saw a gap in the market for a company that provided software for the cheap PC clones that were becoming available (I say cheap, they were still a couple of grand a pop). They also put processing power on people's desks at a relatively low price. This caused the market to explode.
That's not to say MS are great, or even good. They've pulled some nasty tricks in the past. The traps put in Windows 3.1 to prevent competing software working as well, working on OS/2 with IBM, then producing the remarkably similar Windows NT at a lower price. I also believe they shafted Novell over Netware in much the same way.
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Tuesday 1st October 2013 08:10 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: Maybe I'm just too old a fart and remember things that should've been forgotten...
"Why would someone want to run a big UNIX server in order to serve files or run print jobs?"
Microsoft these days are successfully kicking out legacy OSs for tasks like Databases, General Ledger and ERP solutions too! Why would someone want to run a UNIX server at all unless they need more than say 2TB of RAM in a single image?
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Monday 30th September 2013 23:54 GMT JLV
Re: Maybe I'm just too old a fart and remember things that should've been forgotten...
>but "competition" and "[MS] doing well" just don't mix
Upvoted you cuz I dislike MS and I remember the 90s all too well, but...
MS is bad for competition when it has a dominant position or is in danger of getting one. No danger of that happening here.
It's better not to have a two horse race with Sammy & Apple. You all mostly have opinions about Apple and Apple is in the premium, spendthrift if you prefer, end of the market. There is no telling what exactly Sammy would be tempted to do if it were the only big player in the mass market.
At minimum, a decent Nokia showing on budget smartphones will tend to drive prices down for the other two. Potentially, the same impact MS has on the database market - not great, but cheap, drives Oracle price down.
And, possibly, some of what Redmond is up to will include some innovations. Haven't used WinPhone, don't plan to, but the tiles sounded innovative (in principle). And that Nokia camera tech is nifty too, tho it could have been done on Android Nokias. They employ a lot people and are dumping Ballmer - something's bound to bubble up.
The only big loser from MS being around is Blackberry, which is too bad. I just missed buying a Z10.
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Tuesday 1st October 2013 14:05 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: Maybe I'm just too old a fart and remember things that should've been forgotten...
Now that Gartner recommended that companies ditch Blackberry within 6 months, Windows Phone should pick up the bulk of those migrations. It's the obvious choice - highly secure (FIPS 140-2 certified out of the box), easy to manage, with a good selection of cost effective devices - that run MS Office clients.
The alternatives are Apple - overpriced, fragile, harder to manage, and with a pretty poor security record. Or Android - fragmented, glitchy, poor performance, highly insecure with a terrible security record and harder to manage....
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Tuesday 1st October 2013 00:02 GMT Greg J Preece
Re: Doing well?
So let me get this right. In the market where it has the best showing, it has just under 10% market share. Therefore in other markets it has a lot less, so overall it's share is less than 10%. This is good?
Are you under the impression that market domination is the only way to be successful?
Ah, why bother? I'd only be arguing with a brick wall. Looking at the number of downvotes I got for saying "Windows Phone is actually alright", the tribalism in the commentard section only ever increases...
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Tuesday 1st October 2013 19:04 GMT Greg J Preece
Re: Tribalism?
You think we're joining the gang because we hope it will make us more popular and better liked? Or that we believe that MS and Nokia really don't deserve to succeed in the light of crimes past?
So in your head downvoting anyone who likes a product simply because the company that made it were once dicks and you don't like them....isn't OTT? MS aren't my favourite company in the world, but I evaluate their products individually, almost like I'm a rational person. I'd much prefer it if Nokia had been allowed to continue their Maemo/MeeGo/Linux nuttery alongside Windows, because that line of phones was superb for me, but none of that makes Windows Phone a bad product, so I'm not going to say that it is.
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Tuesday 8th October 2013 10:11 GMT N13L5
Re: Tribalism?
"So in your head downvoting anyone who likes a product simply because the company that made it were once dicks and you don't like them....isn't OTT?"
What do you mean "were once dicks"..?
They've been dicks consistently throughout their entire existence! They are now greater dicks than ever...
Products and product changes without regard for customer needs but just to satisfy their self-serving corporate strategy of copying Apple's walled garden with endless tollbooths in a drive to start clipping your wallet on a monthly basis.
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Tuesday 1st October 2013 09:12 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: Doing well?
Hey Greg, Thanks for the warning.... I just wrote a "You know what WP8 is pretty good" based on actually owning/using it rather than going with what I'd read on the internet! I like to make up my own mind. I will retire to the bunker and await the hate mail. But it is pretty good. If I show it to friends who have iPhones and nice Samsung's they also almost all think it looks cool. Will they change? Doubt it, especially the iPhone ones as Apple have done a brilliant job of making the platform sticky. Equally I think it would be a struggle for WP8 to convert many high end Android users. Again because those users get a pretty darn good experience.
But WP8 can clean up disaffected BlackBerry users, and pick up some share from Android? Yes that's realistic. Things change so fast in this industry. Can't see why they would but imagine if Samsung decided to through some weight behind WP8 etc. In the Enterprise Microsoft has a supporters camp with the ability to implement and support in every single one of BlackBerry's customers. What they lacked previously was a half decent product. That is not the case any more. Things change.
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Tuesday 1st October 2013 11:06 GMT cambsukguy
Re: Doing well?
They might switch if, like me, they wanted better battery life and/or a better camera.
To me, having slightly fewer apps (I mean in variation obviously, not raw quantity - or quality for that matter) is less important than having a day out and trying to use a phone on 10% battery instead of 50% or 60% and being worry free.
Then, looking at the pictures I have taken and not wishing I had pocketed a compact camera instead.
Then remembering that all those not-spots meaning maps often don't work or are painfully slow or use up my data allowance meaning I have to have a high data package instead of a tiny 500MB one, thus saving me loadsamoney every month.
Oh wait... there are loads of reasons I switched regardless of the fact that I prefer WP to use as well!
Win, Win (geddit?)
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Tuesday 8th October 2013 09:27 GMT N13L5
I don't know who all those senile or demented people are that don't even have family to warn them against Microsoft.
But the truth is, we need Microcruft in the mobile space just to keep Google honest. Too bad about the poor sods making the big sacrifice and end up with those crummy windphone mobes.
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Monday 30th September 2013 19:56 GMT Paul Shirley
Re: Here we go again
It is beginning to smell bad. With the figures they quote there should have been 4 gaudily coloured Lumias in the smallest pub on last weekends crawl, but when 20 or so phones came out for photos (brewery launch and pub award being given) I didn't spot one.
The rest of the day, many more phones on display in larger places. Still didn't see that flash of bright plastic. Still haven't seen one anywhere but TV and the web.
The ongoing flood of astroturfing seen everywhere is quite astonishing, it would be pretty easy to sign up on the many paid survey sites and affect the results, easy to ignore any warning signs if a survey company was inclined. Suspicious.
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Monday 30th September 2013 21:04 GMT Charlie Clark
Re: Here we go again
@Darryl
not quite but anecdotal surveys can be useful in testing the reliability of such reports: there should be at least some degree of correlation, assuming you weight your own observations. I think I've seen maybe two people using Nokia Windows Phones in about six months here in Germany. They're even starting to disappear from the shops.
As a proxy for market share the mobile browser usage as tracked by Akamai has Windows Phone consistently at less than 1 %. Akamai is by far the world's largest content delivery network (146 of the web's top 1000 websites, some 54 % of those using CDNs) so a reasonable proxy.
The failure to increase sales is, after all, why Microsoft is buying the Nokia handset business.
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Tuesday 1st October 2013 08:07 GMT Joe Montana
Re: Here we go again
Largely because the only people i've ever seen buying windows phones are those migrating from dumbphones, who simply aren't used to browsing from a mobile and are often on prepay sims without a data allowance so wouldn't use it anyway.
Basically they use them as dumbphones, and only bought them because they were being offered very cheap.
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Tuesday 1st October 2013 08:21 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: Here we go again
"Akamai is by far the world's largest content delivery network"
Bu not to Windows Phone handsets, which don't run Flash on which the majority of the websites you mention base their content on...
"The failure to increase sales is, after all, why Microsoft is buying the Nokia handset business"
Nokia have increased sales at 30% a quarter for the last few quarters, and just hit 12% market share in the UK. Microsoft's main reason to buy is more likely that they want to be in a similar space to Apple....
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Tuesday 1st October 2013 08:55 GMT Charlie Clark
Re: Here we go again
@anonymous coward aka Winpho Fanbro
"Akamai is by far the world's largest content delivery network"
Bu not to Windows Phone handsets, which don't run Flash on which the majority of the websites you mention base their content on...
Flash doesn't run on I-Phones or a lot of Androids either. Doesn't seem to be doing their figures a lot o harm.
Nokia sold because it was still losing cash and Microsoft bought because it is betting on the product line and realised tighter integration of hardware and software is required. Plus it needed to do something with it's offshore cash pile.
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Tuesday 1st October 2013 09:54 GMT Charlie Clark
Re: @Charlie
@Prof. Hans Asperger
I think we're pretty much in agreement on why Microsoft bought. But I don't think Elop joined Nokia to run the company into the ground prior to a sale. Given its cash pile Microsoft could have bought the business at any time, and time really has been of the essence. Bringing hardware and software development closer together was highlighted by the Nokia CEO as a requirement for the project to succeed. Microsoft now has to demonstrate the skills necessary to facilitate this and do it quickly.
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Tuesday 1st October 2013 10:48 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: @Charlie
"Microsoft didn't really want to by the Nokia handset business. But they had to; it was failing so fast it would have ceased to exist"
I guess you havnt been watching Nokia for while - Nokia have several $ billion of net cash (even after recently buying 50% of Nokia Siemens networks), have several large credit lines, and are forecast back into profit next quarter.....and Lumia handset sales are growing rapidly!
Microsoft probably just didn't want to risk anyone else buying them first....
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Tuesday 8th October 2013 10:24 GMT N13L5
Re: Here we go again
"As a proxy for market share the mobile browser usage as tracked by Akamai has Windows Phone consistently at less than 1 %."
The actual share of Windphones could be somewhat higher, if you consider that only the very simple minded or senile would end up owning one, after getting bamboozled by some retarded advertising flash.
Many of them would likely be unaware of the internet, let alone be able to brave the complexity of browsing it.
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Tuesday 1st October 2013 00:25 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: Here we go again
Same suspicions here.
I take a vague interest in what phones people are using on the train and I see hardly any of Windows Phones, although there are a few out there if you look hard enough. The supposedly doomed BlackBerry outnumbers them by about 20 to 1, although I'll bet a lot of those BBs are quite old units. That said, the Windows Phones must be selling to some people because my brother got one, more by accident than design. His logic was that it was the only vaguely modern smart phone offered to him for no upfront cost on his dirt cheap contract. He knows little about smartphones and will treat it as a featurephone. He will text and take photos but I can't imagine he will ever pay for an app, or even pay much attention to the free ones. My initial reaction to the thing was pure instinctive horror but, given that it was effectively discounted to zero cost in a desperate attempt to dump the things, it is easy to see how they are ending up in the hands of people who don't care if the Apps are crap or even if the platform has a future so long as it performs its basic functions and that those people are going to be fairly satisfied with their limited abilities. Perhaps that is why I notice so few of them on the train. Their owners are not fondling them on the train like an iPhone, 'Droid or Blackberry, just shoving them in their ears when they ring. So, yes, there probably are more of these around than it seems but 10% of new sales? Pull the other one.
By the same unscientific method of looking at what my fellow commuters are using, I count one, and only one, Microsoft Surface in the wild. Even worse, the guy was looking at Microsoft branded Powerpoints about how great MS products are, so he was either an MS Employee or a real sad case.
Me? I have the dumbest dumbphone imaginable. It must be getting on for 10 years old now. It suits me perfectly as nobody can try to force me to do work on it and the last thing I intend to do is read bloody work email on the damn train.
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Tuesday 1st October 2013 08:28 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: Here we go again
Indeed anyone that thinks 1 in 8 people really have windows phones quite clearly need to live in a Looney bin.
It's more like 1 in 20 here in the real world. I only know of one person, and he got it for free as a Microsoft bribe.
Extrapolated surveys are dangerous, just like the people that believe them
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Monday 30th September 2013 22:50 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: 1020
Well I have no idea if it is as good as you mention, but even if it is, there is a saying for this...
"Even the sun shines on a dog's ass once in awhile.".
Point behind that is, even if it as good as you think or even better, they still need more cowbell in order to breakout in the market.
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Tuesday 1st October 2013 12:16 GMT Nick Ryan
Re: 1020
They do need to market the phones considerably better.
When the adverts are framed in Microsoft Blue with the name Microsoft all over it... that's not a selling point. Take a brand that is almost universally hated (we all hate MS at times, certainly don't trust them) and is often used in equivalence with unreliable and use that as the main branding of a phone advert? Hmmm
Samsung don't advertise their devices as GOOGLE GOOGLE GOOGLE or ANDROID ANDROID ANDROID, and forget what the phones do and what they're there for. Apple don't go iOS iOS iOS, blah, they similarly tell you what the device is promised (except it's all beta software) to do... And yet almost every Nokia phone advert I see is predominantly "Microsoft".
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Tuesday 1st October 2013 15:03 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: 1020
The metro was wrapped in an ad for that phone yesterday and I saw the ad again today (may have been yesterday's metro). I'd love to see MS crash and burn but I wouldn't be surprised if they took 20 or so percent actual market share eventually, they seem to have the upper hand in cheap phones now. Not sure why there aren't more offers like the Huawei Ascend G300 (Android) back in the day. It was decent and cheap.
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Monday 30th September 2013 19:39 GMT Anonymous Coward
You know what's weird?
The last couple months, I've almost completely stopped using my phone for apps and internet and taking pictures. I've mostly just been using it for - get this - phone calls and texts.
For everything else, my Kindle Fire HD and my Chromebook and Windows/Linux laptop are usually handy. There's something to be said for looking at stuff on a screen that's larger than 5 inches, and having a full keyboard (or a super-nice swipe keyboard in the case of the Kindle).
I'm starting to think my next phone might end up being a "dumb phone" with a 4- or 5-day battery life. I know - call me crazy.
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Monday 30th September 2013 20:11 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: You know what's weird?
@AC 20:01 - "No dropped calls, charge twice a week and better coverage. Nowt wrong with that"
Why is it that smartphones are so crappy about dropping calls? I've never figured that out, but I almost never dropped a call when I had a dumb phone.
These days, we almost can't have a conference call at the office, unless everyone agrees to jump on a land line. Multiple people are sure to drop the call if we let them stay on their smartphones.
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Tuesday 1st October 2013 08:39 GMT Squander Two
Smartphones and dropped calls.
Well, as quite a lot of people pointed out back when the iPhone was first launched, Apple had zero experience of making phones. Unfortunately, these people who don't know how to build an arial properly have set the standard. Users justa ccept dropped calls now.
Personally, I've stuck with Nokia throughout -- moved from Series 60 to Series 80 to Maemo to Windows Phone -- and the only time I had a problem with dropped calls was when I was with Vodafone. Oh, or when I call my wife on her iPhone.
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Tuesday 1st October 2013 11:34 GMT cambsukguy
Re: You know what's weird?
That is directly related to the low presence of Nokia smartphones, growing but low, as the people-who-know-some-simple-maths detailed earlier.
Flashy metal-cased smartphones drop calls more easily. Smartphones can actually have better antennae in size and location etc. if they wish (they are bigger after all). They do suffer having a more noisy electronic environment to operate in - they often run an IP stack and transfer data during a call for instance, my 8210 rarely did that and never at 3G speeds.
However, HD audio and noise-cancellation means I have better, clearer conversations in far worse (audio) noise environments and, while call-drops still happen (as they always did), the overall experience is better (as it bloody well ought to be).
So, get a better phone if you don't like the one you have and stop assuming all smartphones are as rubbish as yours - that is one the reasons iPhones sell so well after all - somebody keeps telling them they are the best and they believe it - 'it just works', tosh - they are just adequate smartphones with poor call performance that look nice and have a stupendous amount of apps.
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Tuesday 1st October 2013 00:22 GMT LosD
Re: You know what's weird?
I'm doing that at the moment (out of need, my phone got stolen), and you better make sure that the tablet has 3/4G connection: The moment you use that dumbphone for providing internet to your tablet, you can throw those 4-5 days out the window. I have maximum 2 days of battery.
- And I'm getting a smartphone as soon as the Nexus 5 is out, so I can decide between that and the Note 3. I love a big phone, but it still needs to fit your pants. A tablet just doesn't, and there's no way I'm leaving the house with only a featurephone.
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Tuesday 1st October 2013 08:30 GMT Uncle Slacky
Re: You know what's weird?
Oh good, I'm not the only one! I simply have yet to find any use for a smartphone, and they're too big to fit in my trouser pockets anyway. I have an old Nokia dumb flip-phone (battery lasts up to 10 days) and for everything else there's my faithful old ASUS eeePC 701 4G (which can even run Android if I feel like it).
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Monday 30th September 2013 22:16 GMT Anonymous Coward
WTH...
"Android's growth has been spearheaded by Samsung, but the manufacturer is now seeing its share of sales across the major European economies dip year on year as a sustained comeback from Sony, Nokia and LG begins to broaden the competitive landscape," he said.
Yeah...Samsung its losing market to Nokia...And Android to WP8, but lets forget that Sony does only Android phones and LG favours Android as well...this paragraph its hilarious :-)
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Tuesday 1st October 2013 00:22 GMT bigtimehustler
The only groups and individual people that go on about how Windows Phone is amazing or that the tide is turning it is becoming a success are generally the people who have a vested interest in Microsoft being successful, either because they have business investments in Microsoft technology - either directly or through software that runs on it, or they work in the industry and they have taught themselves all Microsoft skills and hence need Microsoft to be a success to remain in work.
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Tuesday 1st October 2013 07:46 GMT ThatGuy
I belong to none of the groups you mentioned, and my mobe is a Sony Xperia Z (which I really like), but I would like to see WinPho become more popular. Why? 1: more competition is always better; 2: the WinPho interface is the most interesting thing to happen to UI since the mouse was invented and deserves a chance to prosper. Icons on a desktop/home screen (with our without parallax) is so 1980s. I would also like to see BB make a comeback.
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Tuesday 1st October 2013 07:36 GMT Anonymous Coward
I got worried reading the article
when I saw "These models are hitting the sweet spot with 16 to 24 year-olds" - cos I thought no way I am associated with that lot. Bloody young people!
but relaxed when I saw "and 35 to 49 year-olds" - and thought yes, that's me, older boring, less spare income....
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Tuesday 1st October 2013 08:40 GMT Samuel Pickard
Horrible abuse of statistics
Oh, Register, oh how you've been mislead and how you mislead.
Of all the industries I've worked in, then mobile is the most plagued by inaccurate reporting of statistics.
"nearly one in eight phones in the UK now running Windows Phone"
Really? Have a look on a bus in Leicester. Or do you mean this?
"nearly one in eight phones _sold in the UK last quarter_ is running Windows Phone"
Or even (and far more likely)
"nearly one in eight _smartphones_ _sold in the UK last quarter_ is running Windows Phone"
Sounds like one for the BBC and the 'More or Less' team.
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Tuesday 1st October 2013 09:09 GMT Anonymous Coward
WP8 is actually pretty nice to use
I switched (from BlackBerry) to WP8 on a high end Nokia. Looked at Apple and Android also which also looked very attractive. Have been very happy with WP8/Nokia combination. Positives have been that it seems incredibly stable and slick (compared to BlackBerry anyway) and the UI is fun/easy to use. Negatives - Id say not as many apps as Apple and Android, again better than BlackBerry but if I look at my daughters iPhone it has a better selection.
Not sure WP8 will ever make it to number 2 by market share but based on my experience its just possible. They have devices at the low and mid range that could help that.
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Tuesday 1st October 2013 11:44 GMT cambsukguy
Since my son will also have a Lumia and a Surface, when it arrives, I suppose I had better pass his fb details on since, presumably, they will be the least popular kids on the block.
Or, since the kidz couldn't care less and have even less loyalty, no-one will give a crap and they may even look at his phone and say, ooh! I want one, mine just has this stupid grid of icons and keeps breaking when I drop it.
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Wednesday 2nd October 2013 17:29 GMT Anonymous Coward
Of course they do...
"Meanwhile in the US, Apple has had a good year, and now accounts for close to 40 per cent of the mobile market"
As if you needed any more proof that the US has the highest proportion of easily-led, fanatically loyal to whatever stupid idea is pushed into their brain dumbasses in the world.....