So then the question is, why does on phone succeed and another doesn't? It can't be as simple as what reps push, that seems too easy. Sprint pushed the Palm Pre hard, and the phone freaking tanked. I think in the end it really is about a phone being a status symbol, legible to other people, and to date Windows Phone hasn't been that. Buying a phone is an aesthetic choice, and so with any luck the aesthetic upheaval Nokia has introduced into the market that'll change things. Given the stats you provided, RIM should still be ruling the roost--it does everything a consumer wants it to do. And we know how that's working out. I think the criteria we use to decide on phones simply isn't what most consumers use.
No, RIM failed because it didn't realize what consumers wanted. Until the iPhone, smartphones were for businesspeople and techies. The iPhone made smartphones mainstream. Apple did well because it built off its iPod base (Steve even introduced the iPhone by using iPod metaphors). The iPhone is now an established brand that sells itself.
THe reason I brought up high vs. low margin is that you'll all note that only Apple is enjoying record profits these days. This suggests to me that only Apple is really successful in pushing phones for $199 to a large number of consumers. Samsung does well with a few hits, but everyone else in the Android space has been struggling to make actual money, regardless of marketshare. A phone sold for $0 on contract or for just $50 is not making the OEM much money, but it certainly counts towards market share.
Thus, I submit that phones do well when they are (1) pretty, (2) cheap, and (3) pushed by sales reps. Except for the iPhone, that only really applies to the Galaxy S series and then it all goes rapidly downhill from there. Remember, I'm talking about
specific phone models, not an OS in general. Blackberry tanked because the Storm was a piece of crap (my sister had several and they were awful) and it simply was never able to recover in the "slab phone" market. The number of new consumers that were coming to smartphones who wanted physical keyboards was very small, and the original Motorola Droid was able to capture many of them.
Remember, too, that Android was nothing
until the Droid, which made it popular. That phone was pushed by carriers like nobody's business and they were successful in doing so. All subsequent Android phones have benefited from the Droid's initial popularity, and some OEMs, like Samsung, have been able to generate their own hits since then.
The Lumia 900 could very well be WP7s "Droid" insfoar as it's very noticeable and attractive, inexpensive, and the carrier has pledged to push it. Once it gets out there, the numbers will grow, the ecosystem will naturally follow, and there will be a true third competitor. I expect WP7 to mostly cannibalize from Android's current marketshare, but RIM may find itself a few more percentage points down towards zero before all is said and done.