Sunday, February 27, 2011

Microsoft: 'over 2 million' Windows Phone 7 licenses sold to manufacturers so far

Microsoft just dropped a few tidbits of knowledge on us regarding Windows Phone 7's performance in the marketplace so far. Here's what we've got:
  • 'Early research' says 93 percent of WP7 customers are 'satisfied' and 90 percent would recommend the platform to others. We don't know details about the research, though -- number of customers polled, time frame, so on.
  • Average of 100 new apps in the Marketplace per day, and over 6,500 total are available right now.
  • Most importantly, "over 2 million" licenses have been sold to OEMs around the world.
What does that tell us? Well, let's get the elephant in the room out of the way: the iPhone 4 sold 3 million units in a little under a month after its launch, so Microsoft clearly has plenty of room to catch up -- but that comes as no surprise to us, analysts, or Microsoft itself. Furthermore, selling a license to an OEM isn't the same as selling a phone to a customer, since many of these manufactured devices are sitting on store shelves; it's unclear exactly how many WP7 devices are actually in users' pockets right now, but the number is certainly less than "over 2 million."

Microsoft's earnings call is tomorrow where we expect to get more detail on the platform's performance, but the company is saying today that it sees plenty of reasons to be "bullish about the foundation for long-term success" here -- and considering that they simply can't afford to fail in the mobile game, we hope they're right.

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