WASHINGTON: Stephen Elop the Executive Vice President of Microsoft’s Devices & Services business unit said that Microsoft is a very good position to not only deliver the headsets to its valued customers but it is also able to provide services and software.
Stephen Elop before left Microsoft to run Nokia and then again switched Nokia to Microsoft’s Windows Phone operating system, witnessed Nokia’s share price collapse and then sold the company’s handset business back to Microsoft – a chain of events that left people asking whether he had been planted in Nokia as a Trojan horse for Microsoft. That’s another question he must have heard a million times, too, and one that he’s repeatedly denied.
But the question about Windows 10 being Microsoft’s last, best chance in the smartphone business is still worth asking, because other than hoping Windows 10 will be the golden ticket that finally convinces consumers and app developers to switch to Windows phones, the American software company doesn’t appear to have a Plan B for competing with the likes of Apple, Samsung and Google.
(Or, at least, Microsoft doesn’t have a Plan B any more than Nokia did when it switched from the Symbian operating system to Windows Phone in the hope of stabilising its plummeting market share. “Plan B is to make Plan A very successful,” Elop said at the time.)
With Windows 10 – the version due some time this year – creating a uniform platform across PCs, tablets and mobile phones, so that apps written for one type of device will work on others, Microsoft is putting all its eggs in one basket.
“With Windows 10 we are very focused on bringing together all of the different form factors –phones, PCs, tablets, even large-format displays – under a common set of code, a common operating system, a common development environment, and deliver to developers one coherent ecosystem that’s very large in size,” Elop says.
The strategy is to use the presumably huge installed base of Windows 10 PCs – Microsoft has announced existing Windows 7 and Windows 8 users will be able to upgrade to Windows 10 free of charge – as a carrot for third-party developers, who will find themselves developing Windows Phone 10 apps almost without trying, thereby helping Windows Phone to compete with Apple’s iOS and Google’s Android for breadth and depth of offerings in the app store.
Though Windows 10 isn’t due for release until late this year, that strategy of using one part of Microsoft to help others is already in play.
