Microsoft Smartphones Beaten by Bada: Gartner
If you had to look it up, that's okay. Bada is a mobile operating system developed by Samsung, and launched in mid-2010. It has a developer community, and made its debut on the Samsung Wave handset.
It's also beating Microsoft in the smartphone marketplace, at least according to Gartner.
The research firm pegs Microsoft's share at 1.6 percent for the second quarter of 2011, down from 4.9 percent a year ago. It trails Google Android with 43.4 percent, Nokia's Symbian with 22.1 percent, Apple iOS with 18.2 percent, RIM's BlackBerry franchise with 11.7 percent and Bada with 1.9 percent.
Other analyst firms have traced Microsoft's smartphone market tumble over the past several quarters. Research firm comScore, for example, recently estimated that Microsoft smartphones declined from 7.5 percent to 5.8 percent of the market for the three-month period ending in June. That included both Windows Phone and the company's more antiquated Windows Mobile platform, which is being phased out.
As I've mentioned previously, I like Windows Phone. I find the tile-based user interface more conducive to productivity than your usual grid-like screens of individual apps. I like what I've seen with the upcoming "Mango" update, although Microsoft keeps declining to give me a review unit. I think the platform has some serious potential, but unless someone does something radical fairly soon, it's going to end up in the dustbin of dead tech alongside the Kin phone and Symbian.
Microsoft certainly seems determined to stay the course. Over the next few months, manufacturers ranging from Samsung and HTC to LG Electronics and ZTE will all (supposedly) produce Windows Phone devices loaded with Mango, which boasts around 500 new features. Most of those features are little tweaks, but some are radical: new multitasking abilities, for instance, and Bing baked deeply into the user interface.
There's also Microsoft's partnership with Nokia, which must have seemed like a good idea on paper: the Finnish phone maker adopts Windows Phone as its primary platform, boosting Microsoft's global reach and sales. Soon after the partnership announcement, analysts chirped about how Nokia would help power Windows Phone's market share past that of Apple's iOS and RIM's BlackBerry franchise by 2015.
But Nokia's shedding market share so fast I can't look at the analyst numbers without thinking someone must have taken the decimal place on the share percentages a little too far to the right. Recently minted Nokia CEO Stephen Elop (a former Microsoft exec) compared his company's situation to a burning oil platform, but it's now worse than that: the platform's threatening to explode into tiny flaming pieces drifting all over the North Sea.
My point is, Microsoft can't count on Nokia for salvation. And it can't count on Mango, not when rival operating systems are prepping for their own great leaps forward. All Microsoft can do is continue to pour money and effort into the platform in hopes that, two or three years down the road, the landscape changes in ways that allow it to incrementally gain market share instead of lose it. That's an awful position for any company to be in, but I'm not exactly hearing any alternative plans out there.
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