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Microsofts MIX11 conference, due to kick off April 12 in Las Vegas, will assemble a broad range of developers and designers to discuss, among other things, the future of Windows Phone as a viable platform for apps and services. The March 30 posting on the Windows Phone Developer blog reads like a preview of the arguments Microsoft executives will likely make onstage during the conference.Among them: that Windows Phone Developer Tools have proven enormously popular over the past year, having been downloaded some 1.5 million times. That the Windows Phone developer community boasts 36,000 members, and that the Windows Phone 7 ecosystem contains around 11,500 apps.
Based on those numbers, a back-of-the-envelope calculation suggests one app published for approximately every 3.13 developers who signed onto AppHub. It also suggests that, out of the total Windows Phone Developer Tools downloads, fewer than one percent translated into a published app.
"We recognize the importance of getting great apps on our platform and not artificially inflating the number of actual apps available to [customers] by listing wallpapers as a category, or perhaps allowing competitors apps to run on the platform to increase tonnage," Brandon Watson, Microsofts director of developer experience for Windows Phone 7, wrote in the posting.
"We also dont believe in the practice of counting lite apps as unique quality content" he added. "In reality they only exist because developers cant have a Trial API and must therefore do extra work."
Despite the postings advocacy of Windows Phone 7 as a platform, its title ("The Windows Phone 7 Numbers That Matter") and much of its rhetoric hint at an enormous elephant in the room: actual consumer sales numbers.
"You might think that the primary driver is number of handsets in market," Watson wrote at another point. "Based on the conversations we are having with some of our developers, many are telling us that they are seeing more revenue on our platform than competing platforms, despite the fact that we cannot yet match the sheer number of handsets being sold."
Microsoft confirmed at the end of January that some two million Windows Phone 7 units had been sold by manufacturers to retailers. However, the exact number reaching consumers hands remains unclear.
"Our numbers are similar to the performance of other first-generation mobile platforms," Achim Berg (left), Microsofts vice president of business and marketing for Windows Phones, mentioned in a Q&A posted Dec. 21 on the companys corporate website. "It takes time to educate partners and consumers on what youre delivering, and drive awareness and interest in your new offering. Were comfortable with where we are, and we are here for the long run."
In the interim, however, the company has encountered speed-bumps related to software updates for the platform, which in turn has sparked some anger among early adopters. In the United States, two Windows Phone 7 devices -- the Dell Venue Pro and HTC HD7 -- are currently in the delivery stage for the "NoDo" update, which includes cut-and-paste functionality; the other three remain in the "Testing" stage, which is apparently controlled by the carriers.
Longer-term, one analyst believes that Windows Phone 7, thanks to Microsofts recent alliance with Nokia, will surpass both Research In Motions BlackBerry and Apples iOS to become the second-ranked smartphone operating system in the world by 2015, lagging behind only Google Android.
"Up until the launch of Windows Phone 7 last year, Microsoft has steadily lost market share while other operating systems have brought forth new and appealing experiences," Ramon Llamas, an analyst with IDC, wrote in a March 29 report. "The new alliance brings together Nokias hardware capabilities and Windows Phones differentiated platform."
Should that come to pass, it would represent a substantial reversal from Microsofts current fortunes in the mobile space, where it trails rivals with eight percent of the market.
Nicholas Kolakowski is a writer for eWEEK.
