Originally Posted by
a5cent Nowhere did I say that aggressive pricing is the only means by which to gain market share. It stands to reason this would be part of any market share growth strategy however. Many here are expecting the L950/XL to be priced aggressively, precisely because they believe MS would be stupid not to chase market share in that way. When that doesn't happen, it should signify to those folks that MS does in fact not believe market share to be an important enough goal to follow by such means. It's just one of many indicators, and one we'll be able to verify soon. That's why I mentioned it.
It's okay that you mention it, but it's not okay to spin it as MS not caring about W10M. Those are completely different things. It would be like saying that since iOS only has 15% of the market share that Apple doesn't care about iOS unless they start lowering their hardware price by half to "beat Android". It's not an apt analogy to make to begin with, so I'm going to point out how ridiculous it is.
Exactly. Whatever your preferred interpretation is, this does, at the very least, signify that MS is not willing to make the same sized investments into smartphone hardware innovations as Nokia previously has. Unless the folks in Redmond were just sitting around twiddling their thumbs, there is no way they will be able to pick up all the slack.
Another ridiculous claim. Nokia's history is known to be wasteful and full of middle management bureaucracy which prevented their good engineering products from seeing the day, that's why their team is so bloated. There were more than 3 times the engineers keeping Symbian up to date than the entire Windows 7 OS team for instance. Nokia was a bloated company that was inefficiently ran and just looking at the numbers of engineers in the company is a silly thing to do. The fact that MS laid off a bunch of Nokia team has absolutely no barring on the engineering effort MS will put into mobile.
I'm not buying the idea that the abstract notion of "a complete ecosystem" can play an important role in an effective market share growth strategy.
Tell that to Apple, because that's how Apple sell Macs to iPhone users and why Mac sales are growing. Microsoft is just betting the other way - hoping Windows 10 desktop users would buy a W10M to accompany it. This strategy makes sense, and for once MS actually has a good footing to start with due to W10 desktop being well received, unlike W8 which had a terrible reputation which dragged down everything along with it. So yes you CAN indeed sell it to people the idea of a fully "in" ecosystem. The issue is going to be Microsoft's marketing effort, which we can all agree on is terrible, but MS does have a unique product experience in hand that cannot be full realised with a mixed environment. Yes you do get some of it, but it's not best.