Windows Phone จะแซง iPhone ในปี?

ในขณะที่หลายคนยังสงสัยในโอกาสของ Windows Phone แต่ล่าสุด บ.วิจัยไอดีซีออกมาฟันธงว่า ไม่เพียงแต่ Windows Phone จะสามารถเอาชนะ BlackBerry ได้แล้ว มันยังจะแซงหน้าอุปกรณ์ iOS (iPhone, iPod Touch และ iPad) ของ Apple และสามารถขึ้นแท่นแพลตฟอร์มสมาร์ทโฟนยอดนิยมอันดับสองของโลกภายในปี 2016 อีกด้วย :O

นับว่าเป็นการคาดการณ์ที่ฟังดูสุดโต่งมากทีเดียว เนื่องจากปัจจุบัน Windows Phone มีส่วนแบ่งตลาดเฉพาะในไตรมาสแรกของปี 2012 แค่ 2.2% ในขณะที่ BlackBerry ครองส่วนแบ่งตลาด 9.7%  และหากจะพูดถึง iPhone อย่างเดียว (ไม่นับรวมอุปกรณ์ iOS อื่นๆ) ก็ครองส่วนแบ่งตลาดอยู่สูงถึง 23% ซึ่ง Windows Phone ถือว่า มีการเติบโตที่ช้ามาก แต่นักวิเคราะห์ไอดีซีกลับเชื่อว่า Windows Phone จะม่ีการเติบโตที่รวดเร็วภายใน 4 ปี โดยเฉพาะการรุกทางด้านราคา และตลาดเกิดใหม่ โดยคาดการณ์ว่า ส่วนแบ่งตลาดของ Windows Phone ทีมีอยู่ทั้งหมดในปัจจุบัน 5.2% จะก้าวกระโดดเป็น 19.2% ในปี 2016 ในขณะที่อุปกรณ์ iOS จะตกลงจาก 20.5% เหลือ 19% แพ้ Windows Phone ซะงั้น??? ส่วนแพลตฟอร์มอื่นๆ อย่าง Android จะยังครองแชมป์อันดับหนึ่ง แต่ก็ลดลงจาก 61% เหลือ 52.9%

บริษัทวิจัยดังกล่าวไมได้เปิดเผยแค่ตัวเลขสถิติที่มีการคาดการณ์เท่านั้น แต่ยังให้เหตุผลถึงความสำเร็จที่ยิ่งใหญ่เกินคาดของ Windows Phone ด้วย โดยให้เครดิตของความสำเร็จว่าจะมาจากจุดแข็งของ Nokia ในตลาดเกิดใหม่ทีต้องการสมาร์ทโฟนราคาไม่แพง แต่ตอบโจทย์การใช้งานครบถ้วน ซึ่ง Nokia เป็น แชมป์ยอดขาย Windows Phone ในปัจจุบัน นั่นหมายความว่า มันมีโอกาสที่จะพัฒนาตลาดเกิดใหม่อย่างประทศในแถบเอเชีย ละตินอเมริกา และแอฟริกา ให้หันมาใช้วินโดวส์โฟนภายใต้แบรนด์โนเกียได้ไม่ยากเย็นนัก โดยในขณะที่แอปเปิ้ลกำลังขยายตลาดในจีน และยุโรป แต่มันยังมีตลาดในส่วนอื่นๆ อีก ในขณะเดียวกันการขยายตลาดดังกล่าวของ Apple ไม่ได้ประสบความสำเร็จเท่าที่ควร บ.วิจัยยังมองอีกว่า วินโดวส์โฟนจะเป็นสมาร์ทโฟนที่เจาะเข้าตลาดล่างได้ ในขณะที่ Apple ยังคงส่งมอบ iPhone เครื่องเก่าให้ลูกค้าในราคาที่ถูกลง ไอดีซีเชื่อว่า ลูกค้าจะเลือกของใหม่อย่างวินโดวส์โฟนมากกว่า iPhone ตกรุ่น

นอก จากการขยายส่วนแบ่งตลาดผ่าน Nokia แล้ว วินโดวส์โฟนจะยังได้รับแรงขับเคลื่อนจากโอเปอเรเตอร์ยักษ์ใหญ่อย่าง AT&T และ Verizon ตลอดจนกระแส Windows 8 อีกด้วย ซึ่งฐานผู้ใช้พีซีทีรันวินโดวส์ในปัจจุบันสูงถึง 84% ดังนั้น Windows 8 ที่จะเปิดตัว และเข้าไปอยู่ในเครื่องผู้ใช้ด้วยอินเตอร์เฟซ Metro UI ที่คล้ายกันจะช่วยผลักดันให้เกิดการใช้วินโดวส์โฟนมากขึ้น??? ทั้งหมดทั้ง มวลคือปัจจัยที่ทำให้ไอดีซีเชื่อว่า วินโดวส์โฟนจะสามารถแซงหน้า iPhone ได้ภายใน 4 ปี แต่มันดูเหมือนจะมองโลกในแง่ดีเกินไป หรือเปล่า? แต่บริษัทวิจัยยังคงยืนยันความคิดของตนเองว่า ตลาดสมาร์ทโฟนวันนี้อะไรก็เกิดขึ้นได้ แม้วินโดวส์โฟนจะมีส่วนแบ่งตลาดค่อนข้่างน้อยมากในขณะนี้ แต่ก็สามารถขึ้นเป็นอันดับสองได้ เพราะตลาดโดยรวมยังอยู่ในระยะเริ่มต้น มีความอ่อนไหว เปลี่ยนแปลงได้ง่าย ซึ่งนั่นคือโอกาสที่วินโดวส์โฟนทีจะก้าวขึ้นมาเป็นอันดับสองของโลกได้ ว่าแต่...คุณผู้อ่านเว็บไซต์ arip ล่ะครับ คิดเห็นอย่างไรกับประเด็นนี้ Windows Phone จะสามารถโค่น iPhone ได้ภายในอีกไม่กี่ปีได้ หรือไม่ครับ?

คัดลอกมาจากhttp://hitech.sanook.com

Taptitude - a Windows Phone Success Story

FourBros Studio began developing Taptitude early in 2011.  This article is going to look back over the last year as the game has evolved to see how far we've come and how we got here.  For those not familiar with Taptitude, it is a free Windows Phone 7 game with a collection of over 60 competitive minigames.  We initially launched Taptitude in March 2011 with just a handful of relatively simple minigames, and have since updated it every week adding new games and platform features.
Taptitude is free to play, and is supported by pubCenter ads.  In this buisness model, you are paid based on how many 'impressions' you get each day.  The amount you're paid per thousand impressions is refered to as 'eCPM'.  For example, if you get 10,000 impressions at $1 eCPM, then pubCenter will pay you $10.
Over the last year, we've seen exponential growth in our impression rate.  For the first few months we made very little money, and only served a few thousand impressions per day.  As we stuck with the project we added many weekly updates with features including online leaderboards, stars to unlock minigames, coins to purchase game upgrades, and stats to track your progress.  Taptitude continues to evolve, but lets take a high level look at how we did on average over the last year:

We're at nearly 100 million ad impressions, and much of that was in the last few months as you can see from this breakdown of impressions per week over the last year:

Over the same timeframe, you can see that our eCPM fluctuated pretty wildly:

We would love to get $3 eCPM every day, most of the time it's closer to $1.  In the next chart we can see how our revenue is a combination of both eCPM and Impressions:

As you can see, in the weeks of November we had a big spike in eCPM resulting in record revenue despite having significantly less impression than recent weeks.  As we settled into the lower $1 eCPM we've had to grow our user base in order to make it up with impressions.
At the time of this writing, we are about half way through April and we have record impressions per day as seen by the following chart.  There are two clear dips in this chart that show when we diverted our pubCenter ads over to AdDuplex during different marketing blitz efforts.  The reason for this is that we either show a pubCenter ad or a AdDuplex ad, but not both.  Toward the end of this graph, you can see our 1 million impression days!

* NOTE: the dips in pubCenter ads correspond to a spike in AdDuplex ads because this is where we marketed our game using AdDuplex. 
The graphs above show how our impressions have grown over the last year, now lets look at how that correlates to our userbase growth:

In this chart, the orange line shows the cumulative downloads of Taptitude, and the green line represenets the number of unique downloads per day. You can see from this graph that we stayed pretty flat at around 350 new users a day for over 6 months!  There are a couple spikes which tend to line up with getting featured in the Marketplace, releasing major new updates, as well as marketing campaigns that we ran on Facebook and AdDuplex.
Taptitude has been downloaded nearly 300k times in the last year.  With this many users, it's interesting to slice and dice the demographics.  Lets look at the data we've collected in the last 30 days.
We publish an update for Taptitude every week.  We wondered how quickly our users were updating to the latest version:

Most of our active users do a good job of staying on the last few weeks, but there is an anomoly where a significant portion of our users are still on v4.5.  It turns out that v4.5 was the last version we released pre-Mango.  Anyone that hasn't updated to Windows Phone 7.1 (Mango) will be stuck seeing only version 4.5 on the Marketplace.  We've asked our users why they don't update to Mango, considering it's free, and most of the responses were because they didn't have a computer to update their phone with.  Unfortunately this can't be done over the air.
Now let's break down which phones (devices) have played Taptitude in the last month:

Nokia is leading with the Lumia 800 followed by the 710, with the 900 making significant gains in the short period of time since its release.  Despite this, HTC is actually the #1 manufacturer at this time due to the breadth of devices they offer:

We also keep track of the 'culture' of the phones that play Taptitude.  This corresponds to the region that the player is from:

As to be expected, en-US is the primary culture considering Taptitude is only localized to English.  This is followed by a significant portion of our users coming from Great Britain, Germany, and Spain respectively.
Windows Phone is a rapidly growing market where indie developers can be successful.  We are looking forward to an even better second year as indie game developers, and can't wait for Windows 8!
That wraps up our analysis of the last year of Taptitude.  In a future article we will dig into some of the specific stats that we track in game to see how our users are doing.  If you like this type of analysis, follow @FourBrosStudio on Twitter, and/or check out the Taptitude Facebook page.
UPDATE: thank you all for the interest in our post. Looks like many of you are interested in the per-day figures as well, so here is a chart showing our per-day revenue over the last 30 days.

  
 คัดลอกมาจากhttp://fourbrosstudio.com/taptitude/post/2012/04/17/Taptitude-a-Windows-Phone-Success-Story.aspx

Microsoft Tells Windows Phone 7′s App Story

Microsoft on Monday announced details regarding Windows Phone 7 Series’ application store, software development kit and user interface.
As leaked documents hinted in February, the Silverlight and XNA programming environments will play major roles for third-party software developers. Microsoft previewed the software toolkits at its MIX developer conference this morning.

“I think we’ve been very clear since we first started talking about [Windows Phone 7 Series] that it represents a sea change for Microsoft,” said Charlie Kindel, manager of Microsoft’s Windows Phone App Platform and Developer Experience program, in a phone interview with Wired.com. “We’ve revamped just about every aspect of how we build phone software, ranging from how we think about customers to how we do the engineering for the product.”
Windows Phone 7 Series is Microsoft’s reboot of its mobile platform previously named Windows Mobile. Though Windows Mobile established an early lead as the smartphone operating system of choice, the platform last year suffered significant losses in market share in the mobile OS space, while Apple’s iPhone and Google’s Android platform continued to see healthy growth.
With Windows Phone 7 Series, Microsoft is attempting to regain its mobile groove by offering a brand new user interface that integrates applications and multimedia into “Hubs” (i.e., software experiences organized into main categories) as well as a tidier platform for third-party developers to create and serve apps.
For development, Windows Phone 7 Series will employ XNA, a set of programming tools that makes it easier for game designers to develop games for multiple Microsoft platforms, including Windows XP, Xbox 360, Windows Vista and Windows 7. Now that Windows Phone 7 Series supports XNA, customers will be able to download and play games sold through Microsoft’s online store, Xbox Live Marketplace, which currently serves about 300 titles.
Silverlight will serve as the coding toolkit for “rich internet applications.” As Microsoft’s alternative to Adobe Flash, this is not surprising, and potentially gives Windows Phone 7 an edge over phones that don’t support Flash or Silverlight — namely, the iPhone.
To make a long story short, that means most mobile apps will be made with Silverlight, while more graphics-intensive 3D games will most likely be developed with XNA.

“Our focus is on making the tools friction-free for developers to get in as easily as possible,” Kindel said.
Microsoft also detailed the experience of its application store, dubbed Windows Phone Marketplace. Developers will be required to provide trial versions of their applications so customers can try out apps before deciding to purchase them. And similar to what practically everyone is doing with app stores, developers will receive a 70 percent cut of each sale, while Microsoft will take 30 percent.
Microsoft disclosed a lengthy list of partners that have signed up to develop for Windows Phone 7 Series. Notable developers include Associated Press, EA, Foursquare, Namco, Sling, Shazam, Pandora, Netflix and Pageonce.
As for usability, Microsoft’s phones will support about the same touch gestures seen on the iPhone: pinch or double tap to zoom, and swipe in a certain direction to pan, for example. Also similar to the iPhone, Windows Phone 7 Series phones supports push-notification. Dubbed “Microsoft Notification Service,” the service enables third-party apps to send updates to a phone’s home screen and display status messages even when the actual application is not running in the background. Some core integrated features such as the phone and music player will be able to run in the background, but third-party apps cannot, according to Kindel.
Despite those similarities to the iPhone, the general hub-based UI is a major difference from any smartphones on the market. Microsoft will provide a basic framework of hubs on Windows Phone 7 Series’ start screen: People, Pictures, Games, Music + Video, Marketplace and Office. Developers can inject their apps into Microsoft’s standard hubs, and they’ll also have the option to create their own hubs, according to Kindel.
The brand new hub UI should make Windows Phone 7 Series’ app story interesting, said Michael Gartenberg, partner of technology consulting firm Altimeter Group, who attended the MIX keynote this morning.
“We’ll see how the market reacts and how consumers react because it’s a very different user interface,” Gartenberg said. “They’re going to have to justify the differentiation for consumers and developers, and I think there’s going to be a longer story that needs to be told here.”
For hardware, each Windows Phone 7 Series phone will include seven standard physical buttons for controlling power, volume, screen, camera, back, start and search.
(See diagram below.)

 

Microsoft today released the Windows Phone Developer Tools, available for a free download.








คัดลอกมาจาก http://www.wired.com/gadgetlab/2010/03/windows-phone-7-apps/

ยังรู้สึกว่า Windows Phone ใช้ยากกว่า Android

1. nokia-lumia-920-yellow-portrait_gallery_post appsmanila 6 months ago
2. อย่าง แค่ save screenshot ยังใช้งานยากเลย save เสร็จไม่บอกอะไรเลย ไม่โชว์ให้ดูด้วย ต้องเข้าไปถึง Gallery ถึงจะเห็นภาพ ในขณะที่ Android ปัจจุบันกด save screenshot ปุ๊บ จะเด้งขึ้นบน notification bar ใช้ได้ทันทีเลย ไม่ว่าจะเปิดดูเฉยๆ หรือ  share ไปที่ไหนๆ
3. เรื่อง หน้าที่แสดง app ทั้งหมดก็เหมือนกัน เคยลองใช้แบบเรียงแนวตั้งแบบนั้นแล้วหา app อะไรไม่เจอเลย เพราะมันแสดง app ได้น้อยมากในหน้าเดียว วิธีเรียง icon แบบ iOS กับ Android ดูจะเข้าท่าสุดแล้ว ดูเหมือน Microsoft จะรู้ว่าตรงนี้เป็นปัญหาจึงพยายามทำให้เลือกตามตัวอักษรได้ แต่เอาเข้าจริงก็ยังใช้ยากอยู่ดี
4. อีก อย่างที่อยากได้คือแหล่งรวม notification ทั้งหลาย เท่าที่ดู เหมือนกับว่าตัวเลขการแจ้งเตือนต่างๆ เช่น missed call, unread messages จะไปขึ้นที่ tile ของตัวเอง ลองคิดถึงสถานการณ์ที่เราทิ้งมือถือเอาไว้แล้วกลับมาดู เราอยากรู้ว่ามีใครติดต่อมาบ้าง เราต้องไปไล่ดูตั้งกี่ tile ผิดกับ Android ที่ทุกการแจ้งเตือนอยู่บน notification bar และของ iOS ที่แจ้งตั้งแต่หน้า lock screen
   
   คัดลอกมาจากhttp://storify.com/gvdosk124/windows-phone-android

Today’s Top Stories: Android Smokes Windows Phone; Yahoo Board Additions

elcome to this morning’s edition of “First To Know,” a series in which we keep you in the know on what’s happening in the digital world. Today, we’re looking at three particularly interesting stories.

Blogger Claims Windows Phone Challenge Is Rigged

A blogger’s claim that his Android phone beat a Windows Phone in an in-store challenge, but Microsoft failed to acknowledge it and reward him with the promised $1,000 special edition laptop made the rounds Monday morning. The item, by Sahas Katta, CEO of Skatter Tech, was on the front page of Reddit and received more than 1,300 comments. Katta claims that he visited the Santa Clara, Calif., Microsoft store over the weekend and signed a waiver to participate in the challenge. Using his Samsung Galaxy Nexus, Katta wrote that he was able to pull up the weather in two different cities within three seconds, which was faster than the Windows Phone. Despite winning, Katta wrote that he was told he lost “just because.” Then, another Microsoft employee told him that he needed to pull up the weather in two different cities in two different states to win. “I calmly and politely tried pointing out that I was absolutely never told about having to show off two different states, but at this point I realized there was no point in even attempting to argue since the Microsoft Store employees clearly had no intention of even potentially discussing the possibility of considering me the winner,” Katta wrote. Microsoft reps could not be reached for comment Monday morning on the report. Microsoft launched its Windows Phone Challenge at CES in January, but began using it in advertising in February.

Yahoo Appoints Three to Board

Yahoo, facing a proxy fight with one of its largest shareholders, has appointed three new members to its board — John Hayes, CMO of American Express,; Peter Liguori, former COO of Discovery Communications; and Thomas McInerney, the outgoing CFO of IAC/InterActiveCorp — according to The Associated Press. Hedge fund Third Point, which owns a 5.8% stake in Yahoo, had suggested four other directors for the board last week, but Yahoo only accepted one, turnaround specialist Harry Wilson. Third Point issued a statement Sunday night expressing its saying its disappointment and added that it planned to launch a proxy fight.

Apple CEO Tim Cook Visits China

Apple CEO Tim Cook was spotted at an Apple Store in Beijing over the weekend, fueling speculation that he was in talks with Chinese telecoms over the next iPhone. Apple could not be reached to verify the reports, though pictures of Cook circulated among various blogs. Cook visited China last year as COO, but this would be his first time as CEO. Cook’s predecessor, Steve Jobs, never visited that country.

คัดลอกมาจากhttp://mashable.com/2012/03/26/todays-top-stories-android-smokes-windows-phone-yahoo-board-additions/

Windows Phone vNext Collateral Damage – A Developer Story

I managed to get hooked into an interesting debate on Twitter yesterday regarding whether you’d advise someone you know to buy a Nokia Lumia 900 with WP8 just around the corner. This conversation stemmed from a local AU tech journalist awarding the device 5/10 in a review and then later mentioning that the impending release of WP8 was justification for this score – not that the device was that bad). The discussion touched on a fundamental topic I’ve had burning in the back of my brain for some time now – surrounding the impact of Microsoft’s Windows Phone vNext announcements on the existing Windows Phone market.
Apple vs Microsoft vNext Announcements..
While progress and new device/platform announcements are generally an exciting thing – we’ve seen a fairly important differentiation between how Microsoft and Apple execute these with respect to their Phone platforms + hardware.
In most cases – Apple keeps announcements completely secret right up until they hold a major news conference – and then when it’s announced – they demonstrate a finished product ready to sell – accompanied by clear and precise launch dates (normally very short time frames) – so customers know exactly what’s going on. Sure there’s a bunch of rumours leading up to these announcements – but generally they are very far off the mark and the public don’t take them seriously until the real announcement is made.
Microsoft Windows phone announcements on the other hand happen quite differently – in that major Windows Phone updates are announced a long time before they are released – and it’s the platform improvements that are shown off with an early reference device. In almost every case I’ve seen – there is no actual hardware announced – only vague release dates for handsets are given, which are normally a long way off (generally 3-9 months staggered across various regions).  Then there’s a non stop barrage of rumours on what’s going to happen / be released – many turning out to be completely true as they generally come from very good sources.
For customers wanting to buy into either of the platforms – Apple’s way gives them a clear decision – ‘Buy vCurrent or wait until next month/week and get vNext’.  Microsoft’s customers on the other hand are faced with the through process of  ‘I’d like one of these now – but they did announce vNext was coming at some point soonish so I’d better wait until then’….

vNext versus the vCurrent App Publisher..
The problem for App developers is that they are only at any point making their revenue based on what’s out there right now and available to the general public – and due to the once off App ‘purchase for life’ model on Windows Phone 7.x – sales are very much pinned to how Windows Phone is doing at retail (and ultimately how many new customers are made available to them over time).
Unfortunately – every time the proverbial vNext carrot is dangled in front of the public – vCurrent handset sales stall – creating more confusion + bringing in less customers – and resulting in reduced App sales.
I’ve been deeply suspicious that this has been going on for a while – and thought I’d chart out my daily app sales in the Australian Marketplace versus the various major Windowsphone events related to me (such as vNext Announcements and then other events specific to me or to the AU Market).
Just to explain the numbers you are seeing above – these are the combined total of sales across all mobilewares.net Windows Phone 7 apps in the Australian Marketplace (from Early 2011 through to now).  I’ve been lucky enough to have some of the top selling Apps in Australia over this period (including AU Weather Pro and also a bunch of AU focused Sports titles) – some of them I would like to consider to be ‘must have apps’ to Australians – and am confident a fairly consistent % of new users to the platform will purchase them.
I should also mention that my Apps ranking on the top (selling) charts in AU have been pretty much consistent for quite a while (AU Weather Pro has been top selling non XBLI title for a long time + the sports titles have been the top 3 ranked in their genre since launch)  – so I’m also reasonably confident the quantity of Apps I sell is pretty relatively close to the trend other publishers in this region are seeing.
Due to the commercially sensitive nature of these actual figures – I’ve simply referred to the quantities with a unit system of ‘x’.  Ie. ‘2x’ point on graph is exactly double the amount of units of ‘x’.   The charted line is also a ‘line of best fit’ from the charts produced by the App Hub – the actually line per each day is a very zig-zaggy line – sometimes going below/above the line of best fit due to interim events (like having an App as the ‘featured app of the day’).
Also please note : This is not meant to be a scientific observation – I’m sure those that concern themselves with market predictions and analysis as their full time job have much more sophisticated metrics and models – I’m just going by what I have in front of me..
The Impact of vNext Announcements
From analysing my chart there’s a very obvious effect I’m seeing as a result of vNext announcements/leaks (denoted in the Red Callouts above) – App sales take a swift and sudden downward turn (which I’m very certain is a direct reflection on handset sales).  The three significant events have been the Mango/7.5 announcements, the leaked WP8 announcements late April (indicating WP7 handsets would have no upgrade path to WP8) and then the nail in the coffin the official WP8 announcements in June.
I’ve also mapped out good/positive events on this timeline (denoted with green callouts) – such as new app launches from my company (which of course drive sales), handsets actually being released in AU – and major marketing initiatives namely the Nokia Lumia launch (which was accompanied by a lot of really well done TV advertising and public awareness campaigns).
The disappointing bit is that WP7 really looked like it was taking off this year with the Nokia launches – and was obvious traction was finally being gained.  That sharp rise in market share was however killed with the WP8 announcements (and no actual firm dates for availability) – in an even more comprehensive manner then last years Mango announcements (even though it took Australian’s close on 10 months to actually get local Mango handsets it was only a few features being sacrificed and there was no threat of it being completely obsolete that we face today).
The really bad news for devs… fragmentation is coming to a market near you…
While It’s not hard to deduce that things are not going well for Windows Phone platform (market share wise) – I’m pretty certain things are going to get quite worse in the short to medium term – particularly for App developers.  When Windows Phone 7 appeared and up to now – Microsoft’s overall market share of the phone market hasn’t changed all that much – and what’s slowly happened is the % of WinMo 6.x users versus WP7 users has slowly changed (to today when the WinMo users are only a small percentage – many of them actually going to a different platform altogether).
I think it’s quite possible we may see the same transition happen with WP7 > WP8 users (with not that much change for Microsoft’s overall Smartphone market share) – so for a developer this fragmentation is not great news. Apps designed for WP7 will be faced with a potential user base that’s contracting quite rapidly (of which this started a few months ago) – and apps designed for WP8 will need to wait quite a while for enough customers to appear.
Although not a 100% certainty – my gut feel is that customers purchasing Apps on WP8 won’t be that keen to shell out for WP7 titles (even though they ‘will work’) – and instead will wait for WP8 Apps which take full advantage of the platform/resolution and features. I’d be interested to see what the game sales figures were for consoles which provided legacy support (such as the PS2 allowing PS1 titles to be used) – sure many ‘existing’ owners would have been happy – but doubt many rushed out to buy new PS1 titles to use on their PS2.
As someone who has invested a lot in the Windows phone Silverlight/.NET platform – I’d really hoped to get several years out of the code, designs and infrastructure I’d put together for my Apps (which I’d thought would eventually make the investment worthwhile) – however being faced with starting again from scratch is daunting – not to mention risky as there’s no guarantee Microsoft won’t decide in a year or so that WinRT is also going to be superseded with something else.  Having done quite a bit of WinRT work already (for Windows 8) – I also know first hand that porting/migrating apps from SL on WP7 is not the simple task it’s claimed to be (as the XAML/layout is so different you really need to start from scratch to make experiences which customers really want).
I do realize Microsoft really did need to do a ‘reboot’ on their entire Smartphone strategy – however this many reboots and poorly timed announcements and leaks is not a great thing. Their actual development platform is so much better then anything else on offer (Android/iOS development environment feels like taking a step back into the 90’s) – but without a worthwhile market for devs to sell Apps to – it’s a hard to justify it.
The one shining light is that the Win8 market is hotting up and will help many developers subsidize their WP8 titles by sharing technologies – but time will tell on whether it pans out this way or those devs just focus on Win8 only. I’m still very much undecided on these counts myself – and while I know I’m sure I will release some Apps for WP8 – I doubt it will get the same energy I once gave WP7 – and my focus will be mainly on Windows 8.

คัดลอกมาจาก http://mobilewares.wordpress.com/2012/08/20/windows-phone-vnext-collateral-damage-a-developer-story/

Windows Phone sales quadruple, 7.8 update coming early 2013

At Microsoft's shareholders' meeting today, Steve Ballmer said Windows Phone 8 sales were off to a "great start." The combination of new software and more powerful hardware had resulted in four times as many sales as this time last year, the Microsoft CEO said.
The two high-end devices, the Nokia Lumia 920 and the HTC Windows Phone 8X, have both been selling out in a number of markets.
How many units that actually translates into is left conveniently unspoken. Shanghai Securities News reports that Nokia has already taken orders for 2.5 million Lumia 920s in the 20 days the phone has been on the market. This isn't far off the 2.76 million Windows Phone handsets that Gartner estimates were sold in the fourth quarter of 2011. The Lumia 920 is on track to sell more devices this quarter than all Windows Phone OEMs managed a year ago.
Microsoft also talked about Windows Phone 7.8 for the first time since June. Windows Phone 7 devices won't be upgradable to Windows Phone 8. Instead, they'll receive a small update branded Windows Phone 7.8. Previously, Microsoft confirmed this update would include the new Start screen with its variable Live Tile sizes. The company now says it will include a little more than that, though not much more: 7.8 will carry more colors, the option to use Bing images on the lock screen, and protection against having your phone wiped due to too many failed PIN attempts.
The update will be delivered to "as many devices as possible" in early 2013. This language implies that not all devices from all carriers are likely to receive the update. If true, this continues the haphazard update support plaguing the platform.
Windows Phone 7.8 won't be limited to existing devices, though. New models are due to debut in emerging markets that will run this new version of Microsoft's old smartphone operating system. Though these won't run apps designed for Windows Phone 8, both the old operating system and the new one will run apps built for Windows Phone 7.5.

คัดลอกมาจากhttp://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2012/11/windows-phone-sales-quadruple-7-8-update-coming-early-2013/