Microsoft Is Losing Mobile Subscribers Faster Than It Can Gain Them

Microsoft Is Losing Mobile Subscribers Faster Than It Can Gain Them


When you run the numbers on Microsoft’s mobile platform, it doesn’t look good. Despite the debut of Windows Phone 7 about a year and a half ago, the company is losing mobile users faster than it can add them.

For a three-month period ending in February, Microsoft nabbed a paltry 3.9 per cent of the market, slipping 1.3 percentage points from November and 3.8 points from a year ago, the latest figures from comScore show. Redmond currently lags far behind even BlackBerry, which has been dealing with massive problems of its own, and snagged 13.4 per cent of the space in February.

Microsoft’s platform has been on a freefall since the end of 2007, the year Apple just about started digging graves for these second-tier platforms by introducing the iPhone. At that point, Microsoft still controlled 36 per cent, according to comScore, but by the end of 2009, that figure had been slashed in half to 18 per cent.

For the record, Apple and Google are sitting pretty, currently speaking for 30.1 and 50.1 per cent of the OS share respectively.

So what, if anything, can Microsoft do to get it back? Or at least, can it stop losing ground? It’s banking pretty hard on the new Nokia Lumia 900. While it’s a step in the right direction, Microsoft is on a downward trajectory, and it needs to do something drastic to get people interested in its OS. [ReadWriteWeb]


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