Microsoft’s Windows Phone is dying a rapid death

Microsoft's latest quarterly earnings report has highlighted just how screwed Windows Phones are.

Over the last three months Microsoft sold only 2.3 million Lumia smartphones, a massive 73 percent drop when compared to the same period last year. Looking at the quarter before last, Lumia sales experienced a drop of 54 percent.

This correlates with Gartner's smartphone statistics for the last quarter of last year, where it noted that Microsoft's Windows Phones only managed to claim 1.1% market share, and sold only 4.3 million phones. For comparison, 325 million Android phones were sold to end-users in Q4 2015, while Apple's iOS-powered devices enjoyed 71 million sales.

For those of you with a keen business mind, those numbers don't bode well for the Lumia brand or Windows Phone's long-term survival.

But fear not, while Windows Phones are seemingly in a freefall into oblivion, the earnings report showed that many other parts of Microsoft's business have remained profitable, and impressively so.

The company's Surface tablet (which is still not yet available in South Africa) increased its revenue by 61 percent as demand for the Surface Pro 4 and Surface Book increased, and Xbox Live's monthly active users grew 26 percent year-on-year to 46 million subscribers.

"Organisations using digital technology to transform and drive new growth increasingly choose Microsoft as a partner. As these organisations turn to us, we're seeing momentum across Microsoft's cloud services and with Windows 10," said Satya Nadella, chief executive officer at Microsoft.

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