Nokia already nearly 50% of Second Generation Windows Phone market share
Using data available from OccasionalGamer's game collection, who has more than 1 million game installs, it is possible to estimate the relative share of the various Windows Phone 7 OEMs, and as can be reasonably expected …
Context & Ripple Effects
Windows Phone 7's first year was rough by the corpus's own record: the launch quarter's 1.5 million devices went to carriers rather than consumers, and by early 2011 legacy Windows Mobile was still outselling the new platform. Asymco's October 2011 retrospective framed the ecosystem as underperforming its ramp expectations despite IDC's earlier claim that the marketplace was growing faster than Android's.
First-order effects
- Nokia's first Microsoft-software handsets, launched only months ago, already account for nearly half of second-generation Windows Phone volume per OccasionalGamer's 1-million-install dataset — a rare positive datapoint for a company that lost $19 billion in market value during 2011.
Second-order effects
- The remaining Windows Phone OEMs see their shelf space and carrier leverage shrink as Nokia becomes the platform's volume anchor, while Microsoft's reported push around an LTE 'Ace' device for AT&T — still unconfirmed — would concentrate carrier marketing further on Nokia hardware.
Third-order effects
- If the ~50% share hardens into dominance, Windows Phone risks becoming a single-OEM ecosystem in which Microsoft's mobile fortunes rise or fall with Nokia's execution — a structural dependency rather than a broad manufacturer coalition.
The trend: Windows Phone is consolidating from a multi-vendor platform into a Nokia-anchored one, with each share reading tightening that dependency.