During yesterday’s ReMIX Microsoft showed an interesting slide that didn’t go unnoticed by me ( you can see it above). According to IDC predictions 30Million Windows Phone 7 devices will be sold by the end of 2011 with 1.6 million of them only in France ( in 2008 only 18M WM licenses were sold and even less in 2009). This seems a lot especially for a new platform but the company is expecting that 40% of the handsets sold in 2011 will be smartphones (compared to only 14% in 2010) and hopes to grab a piece of the pie and generate money through the licensing fee and services integrated in WP7 (Zune music and movie downloads and 30% cut in the Marketplace). Just for comparison’s sake, Apple has sold 51,234,000 iPhones to date (and they are probably going to continue to sell a whole lot..).
UPDATE: Seems like there is some confusion going on right now. IDC is claiming that the slide is wrong and that their forecast for 2011 is 32 Million instead of the 30 Million quoted in the slide (and that it encompasses all Windows Mobile OS, not WP7 only). Splitting hairs much? eh? Let’s be logical here for a second please. Starting this fall WM6.X is as good as dead and MS logically estimated that out of the 32 Million estimated licenses sold only 2 Million would be WM6.X licenses (that’s why they estimated that 30 Million WP7 phones will be sold by the end of 2011). But it gets even better.. Microsoft issued a statement to please the IDC who seems a little bit pissed off over nothing:
“At the reMix conference in Paris, Microsoft presented a slide projecting the number of Windows Phone 7 phones to be sold in 2011. This slide was inaccurate, and intended to represent an analyst’s assessment of the market opportunity. We have not provided any sales forecasts for Windows Phone. Microsoft is introducing a fundamentally new design and experience with Windows Phone 7 in an effort to reposition our mobile business for the long-term.”
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