But now even Microsoft have sort of admitted it's valiant push to become the third viable smartphone ecosystem has come to a close.
Earlier in the week, according to a report released by Gartner, perhaps the world's leading information technology research company, smartphones with the Windows OS installed accounted for only 0.7% of Smartphone sales in the first quarter of 2016.
Despite a slick OS, that was easy to use, easy to master, and installed on good hardware from Nokia, the writing was seen as being on the wall even back in January. Windows Phone had a promising, if slow start, but sales have been in decline since a peak in 2014.
If there was any doubt however that Microsoft were planning to dump Windows phone as a going concern, the news that Microsoft plans to scale back its smartphone business and cut back over 1800 jobs directly linked to its smartphone business, should probably really allay those doubts once and for all.
The move comes only 2 years after the Redmond based tech giant forked out $7.2 billion to but Nokia's handset business. According to the BBC, one union official said Microsoft had abandoned its plans to produce any further handsets of its own.
1350 of the jobs that will be lost will be in Finland itself as Microsoft seek to find a buyer for that part of its operations.
"We are focusing our phone efforts where we have differentiation — with enterprises that value security, manageability and our Continuum capability, and consumers who value the same," said Satya Nadella, chief executive officer of Microsoft. "We will continue to innovate across devices and on our cloud services across all mobile platforms."
Quite what that statement means is anyone's guess, but some experts have predicted that the next grab for a slice of the smartphone market will probably be a Windows 10 smartphone version of the Microsoft Surface.
Source: News For Windows Phones Not Good
No comments:
Post a Comment