Time is running out for Windows Phone to turn around

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Microsoft has been particularly active recently, and its strong advocacy of Windows 10-centered productivity and platform strategy is widely known in the industry. However, Microsoft has remained silent on the important progress of Windows Phone, one of the important carriers of the Win10 full platform.

Microsoft's low profile on the WP issue is closely related to the product's lagging market status. According to research data, the market share of WP phones in China has slightly rebounded from 0.8% a month ago to 1.2%; at the same time, compared with the North American market share of 4.8%, the European market performed slightly better, currently rebounding to 10%. Despite this, compared with the huge global market share of Android phones and iPhones, WP products are still struggling, and this situation will hardly change before WP phones equipped with the Win10 system are launched.

Now that Windows Phone is on the verge of collapse, can Windows 10 become the key life-saving straw? What are its chances of making a comeback in the future?

1. Apple begins to eat into Android's market share, leaving little time for Microsoft

Apple has already taken some actions to erode Android. Some analysts believe that Android's global market share has slowly declined since it reached the top last year, especially under the record-breaking sales of Apple iPhone 6 and iPhone 6 Plus, this trend has begun to accelerate. A report from Kantar Wordpanel ComTech believes that Android's market share in major global markets has declined to varying degrees, and 32.4% of the lost users have switched to Apple phones; another ComScore data shows that the market share of iPhone and Android phones in North America has shrunk to less than 10 percentage points.

It can be seen that Apple's strategy in the field of smart phones has changed from profit-first to market domination. If the iPhone further expands its global market share, it will inevitably counter the expansion of WP phones, and ultimately make Microsoft's intention to divide the world into three parts of the smart phone system come to nothing. Apple is trying to use the "exclusive" method to balance the smart phone landscape. On the one hand, it relies on the comparative advantage of the combination of software and hardware to shake the share of Android, and on the other hand, it relies on clever marketing methods and market opportunities to suppress the rise of WP. Its purpose is to cultivate group habits by occupying a large proportion of the user base for a long time, and to drive out all other competitors by using the inertia of user habits and product stock replacement. This is exactly what Microsoft did to deal with Apple computers and Linux systems back then.

Why do we say that the market does not have much time left for Microsoft? We know that the current performance of Windows 10 can only be regarded as "showing its face", and its official version may not be available until this fall, not including the launch time of WP phones equipped with Win10 system, which spans more than half a year. In order to prevent WP phones from affecting the iPhone landscape with Win10's cloud strategy and the concept of "productivity and platform", Apple has been planning to launch an offensive since the day Win10 appeared. Whether the Win10 phones that will be released in the future can successfully put out the fire has turned into a life-and-death race.

2. Win10 is "compatible" with Android and iOS applications. It looks good but there are many difficulties.

Android's weaknesses have been firmly grasped by Apple. Google's lack of control over the entire Android industry chain and Samsung's rebellion as a major ally of the Android camp have allowed the large-screen iPhone to take advantage of the situation and frequently succeed. Microsoft will naturally not miss such an opportunity and has publicly announced that Android and iOS application developers can port their programs to the Win10 platform by reusing code. This move not only signals its intention to attract Android application developers, but also serves as a countermeasure to the aggressive offensive of iPhone.

The idea of ​​Win10 being "compatible" with Android and iOS applications is certainly a good idea, but there are two major problems as to whether it can play a positive role in increasing the actual sales of WP phones and expanding the influence of the product.

***, the developer environment is Microsoft's inherent advantage. It is reasonable to attract non-WP application developers with the powerful Visual Studio Azure cloud combination. However, whether Android developers who are used to the open source environment and Apple developers who use Xcode will change their existing habits because of the benefits of the Win10 development environment, they must make a trade-off between these two aspects. At the same time, whether Microsoft can successfully convert non-WP developers also depends on the value and opportunity cost that Win10 applications bring to them.

Second, it is still unknown whether the Android and iOS applications can be compiled and run smoothly in the Win10 environment after code reuse. Although Microsoft has repeatedly demonstrated the feasibility of this solution, and we do not need to question Microsoft's industry-leading software technology strength, different systems, different architectures, and bottom layers present two completely different environments. Imagine that a program that simply reuses code can still perform well after being ported to a different system environment. This is obviously a big problem. A small episode at Build2015 (when a female worker displayed a ported Android application on a Win10 phone, the system displayed the "return to the desktop, restoring" operation) also shows that Microsoft still needs to make follow-up improvements on this issue.

3. “Productivity” alone is not enough, personalization is the key

We know that Microsoft is particularly fond of the concept of "productivity", which is due to the fact that productivity is Microsoft's core value and Windows' biggest competitive advantage. Therefore, it is natural for Microsoft to extend its productivity advantage to the mobile platform. At Build 2015, Qiao Beifeng demonstrated the experience of turning a mobile phone into a PC with the help of the Continuum mode. The universal program adapts to different screens and different input methods, highlighting the heavyweight changes of Win10 mobile phones that are different from Android and iPhone. However, we believe that the future of WP mobile phones is still not enough to rely solely on productivity.

Although productivity is the greatest temptation for end users, it is not all about mobile life. The previous smart phone landscape proves that the success of iPhone and Android is not due to productivity but their own unique advantages. This does not mean that productivity has no value on the mobile side, but it must be combined with other advantages, such as more open personalized customization. In fact, Microsoft can learn from the characteristics of Android and be more bold and open in the interface style and theme change of Win10 mobile operating system, allowing more developers to participate in theme customization, giving consumers more choices, and even allowing users to try to change the tile interface independently. This will increase the chances of Win10 mobile phones winning the market in the future.

***

Although Win10 mobile phones still face certain challenges in market promotion and technical solutions, its rare appearances have attracted enough attention from Apple and have changed the product strategy of the iPhone to a certain extent, which shows that it has begun to have a deterrent effect among similar products. What Microsoft needs most now is time. It must launch a new generation of Windows Phone products before the current smartphone landscape changes. This race is crucial.