Microsoft's Phone Efforts Move Into the Spotlight Wednesday
While Monday was a huge day for Microsoft, thanks to the Surface tablet, Wednesday is also shaping up as a pretty important milestone. — The company is set to meet with developers to talk about the future of Windows Phone …
Context & Ripple Effects
Microsoft's phone business has been a story of resets: the Kin experiment written off in 2010 (Microsoft's latest phone experiment), a Windows Phone 7 launch whose early sell-through was reportedly just 40K handsets (Microsoft Sells 40K Windows 7 Phones), and then the February 2011 Nokia partnership that made Windows Phone the Finnish maker's smartphone platform of record. The arc since has been one of slow rebuild rather than breakout.
The timing matters: this developer briefing lands one day after Microsoft's June 18 Surface tablet unveiling, where the company showed it is willing to build its own hardware as 'the ultimate stage for Windows' — without pricing or availability details. Flurry data published the same week argues Windows Phone is closer to Android in usage growth than its market-share rank suggests, giving Microsoft a rare positive datapoint to bring into the room.
First-order effects
- Windows Phone developers get their first post-Surface signal of where Microsoft is taking the platform — whether the phone OS converges with the Windows 8/RT design language shown Monday shapes what they build next quarter.
Second-order effects
- Nokia, which staked its smartphone lineup on Windows Phone in 2011, needs the developer meeting to yield visible app-catalog momentum; thin third-party support is the main reason carriers and buyers hesitate over Lumia devices.
Third-order effects
- If Surface marks a durable shift to Microsoft-made reference hardware, the same logic eventually reaches phones — moving the company from pure licensee toward an Apple-style integrated model and straining relationships with handset OEMs like Nokia and HTC.
The trend: Microsoft is transitioning from a license-everything software vendor into a company that controls its own endpoint hardware, with Windows Phone the next category after tablets where that tension plays out.