In the smartphone business, the conventional wisdom is that everyone is battling for third place behind Google and Apple.
But after listening to briefings from some of their competitors, I’m beginning to think Google and Apple may soon have the market to themselves. In other words, in the not-too-distant future, your choices of a smart phone may well be an iPhone or one running Google’s Android — and that’s it.
At the D: Dive Into Mobile conference in San Francisco earlier this month, representatives of Microsoft, Hewlett-Packard and Research In Motion were brought on stage to talk about their companies’ smart phone strategies. But under questioning from the hosts and the audience, none could articulate a clear or persuasive case for how their platforms will survive the coming shakeout.
Take Joe Belfiore, a corporate vice president at Microsoft who oversees the company’s Windows Phone 7 software, which hit store shelves early last month. When asked how well devices using the software are selling, Belfiore declined to give any sales figures. When pressed to do so, he said it was “too soon to talk about sales numbers.” He added that Microsoft was “getting good feedback” from its customers.
Microsoft, of course, has no obligation to release its Windows Phone sales figures, and Belfiore, as a midlevel executive, may not even be authorized to give them out. But his silence spoke volumes. You better believe that if Windows Phone 7 was seeing blockbuster sales, he would have trumpeted the fact.
Sales figures aside, Belfiore was just plain unconvincing when it came to explaining how Microsoft planned to make Windows Phone 7 devices competitive. Conference host Walt Mossberg noted that despite coming to market more than three years after the iPhone, Windows Phone 7 still comes up short, lacking features such as multitasking and copy-and-paste. Belfiore’s response was…