‘Windows Mobile sales will double in a year’

Life has not been easy for Microsoft’s mobile operating system — Windows Mobile, popularly called WinMo. According to IT research firm Gartner, the product has seen its market share drop drastically from 52.6% in early 2006 to just 9.3% in the second quarter of 2009.

And things are unlikely to get any easier for the company, according to the researcher. Currently trailing Symbian, Blackberry and Apple, WinMo is forecast by Garnter to slide to number five by 2012 as Google’s Android rises up the charts. The Redmond, Washington based company is trying to fight back. Last week released its WinMo’s latest version, the ‘6.5’.

DNA Money’s Sreejiraj Eluvangal caught up with Sumeet Gugnani, head of mobile for Microsoft India, to find out how the company plans to revamp WinMo, something which Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer recently confessed to having “screwed up”. Excerpts from the interview:

Globally, your market share is estimated at 9.3%. What are your India numbers like?
This year, we expect to sell around 3 lakh units. Since the smartphone market in India is expected to be around 3-4% of the overall market that gives us around 10% of the smartphone market in India as well. Around 8 lakh out of the installed base of 50 million Windows phones are in India.

What has been the growth like?
Three years ago, we were selling 25,000 Windows Mobile phones a year in India. Now the figure is 3 lakh. In the last four quarters, we have doubled our numbers and expect to do so again the next year, too.

Would you agree that there are usability issues around the Windows Mobile platform which has prevented its mass adoption?
I don’t agree with usability being worse-off or better-off on our platform compared with other smartphone operating systems. I think it is a factor of prior experience. It is like you have been using a particular car and someone comes and gives you another one. There will be some issues. On the contrary, we believe that there is a fair amount of overlap between the PC users and the smartphone users. Most people who can afford a smartphone are usually already using a PC running Windows. So, I would argue that it helps to find everything in familiar places when they move from the PC to the smartphone.

An iconic product like the Apple iPhone, which has sold millions in the US, has found few takers in India. What do you think is the reason?
It is purely a case of pricing. In our own case, the threshold price for a Windows Mobile phone in India was Rs 20,000 three years ago. Two years ago, it was Rs 15,000 and now, it is in the range of Rs 11,000.

Do you try to incentivise your hardware partners to bring out cheaper models, for example, by linking your licence fees to the overall price of the phone?
We do believe that there is a much greater opportunity at the lower end of the price-band that has been tapped so far. We try to show OEMs (original equipment manufacturers) the opportunity that lies in the greater addressable market that comes with the lower price, through discussions. However, we don’t believe that the price of the operating system is substantial enough to determine the overall prices.

You have introduced an application store, Windows Marketplace, for the third-party application developers...
We have started off with 500 applications and the number will go up for the simple reason that there are another 20,000 third-party applications that already run on our platform. We have a history of 5-6 years of working with developers who make applications for our mobile platform. So, instead of just increasing the number of the applications, we are more concerned about choosing the right ones.

What are the eligibility criteria?
No, it is a fairly structured process. As long as an application meets certain well laid out criteria, it will qualify. It must be suitable for public consumption, since it is an open platform. It has be less than 10 MB in size since the installation has to be done over the air.

Will you allow a product that competes directly with your own, such as a media player application?
There has to be something new about the application. Media player is not an application. Something related to food, travel or productivity would be application in the real sense.

So one can expect to see a Gmail application from Google as well?
As long as it meets all the criteria, yes; I guess.

How is your approach with the 6.5 different from 6.1, announced a year-and-a-half ago?
6.5 reflects our belief that the mobile ecosystem is evolved from a purely hardware based approach to a hardware and software business sometime back. It is now evolving into a three-pronged business with hardware, software and services aspects. Both ‘Marketplace’ and ‘Myphone’ are reflections of that belief. Myphone, for example, entitles anyone who purchases a Windows Mobile phone to free internet-based mobile back-up service. So, all your contacts, emails and other files on the phone are backed up and available on the internet, subject to a storage limit of 200 MB.