Microsoft Corp., which has stumbled repeatedly in its bid to become a major player in the booming smartphone market, moved Monday to narrow the gap at the industry's top trade show in Barcelona, Spain.
In a splashy, highly choreographed media event at the annual Mobile World Congress, CEO Steve Ballmer unveiled the Windows Phone 7 Series operating system.
Microsoft is targeting the booming market of consumers who are increasingly attracted to cellphones that, in addition to offering phone and e-mail, allow users to watch movies and TV, listen to music, take and share photos, chat on Facebook, play games and engage in other social activities not necessarily related to their professional lives.
Ballmer described the new platform as a "new beginning" rather than "next chapter" for Microsoft, the personal-computer giant that has flopped for years in its bid to replicate that success in the smartphone market.
The 7 Series "is a really different kind of phone built for lives in motion," Ballmer told a gathering of hundreds of journalists, many of whom were crammed into side rooms to watch the show-and-tell on TV screens.
He alluded to the gambling nature of a product launch into a market being saturated by competitors, many using Google's new Android operating system.
"We hope seven's our lucky number," he said.
The new operating system is expected to be on the market by Christmas, according to Microsoft.
The Windows mobile operating system was used in roughly one-quarter of cellphones six years ago, but the American company has lost much of that market share thanks to gains by Research In Motion Ltd, the Waterloo, Ont.-based maker of the BlackBerry, and Apple Inc.'s hugely popular iPhone.
An analysis by the research group Gartner says the share of smartphones equipped with the Microsoft operating system has slid to 7.9 per cent of the total market in the third quarter of 2009.
The leader was Nokia's Symbian technology, with a 44.6-per-cent share.
RIM's BlackBerry was second at 15.9 per cent, while Apple's iPhone was third at 12.9 per cent, according to the Gartner data cited in a report by Agence France-Presse.
The Windows launch could present another competitive challenge for RIM, which has strong loyalty among business users who appreciate the BlackBerry's tough security features.
Some observers say the BlackBerry could face difficulty trying to keep up with consumer demand for many of the flashier features on the iPhones and other market entries.
However, one analyst who follows RIM closely said Microsoft doesn't pose nearly the same threat to RIM as Apple.
"They're not cool," said the analyst, who spoke on condition of anonymity because he hasn't yet published his views for his investment bank.
Consumers simply aren't interested in Microsoft phones because "RIM and Apple have made them irrelevant," he saidMicrosoft vice-president Joe Belfiore, who presented the new phone to the media on Monday, did his best to shake the company's uncool "geek" image that has been exploited by Apple TV ads.
Belfiore dressed, spoke and moved like the Apple hipster of the TV ads, wearing a sports jacket over a T-shirt, along with longish hair framing a barely-noticeable five-o'clock shadow.
The Microsoft executive twice said he was "super-excited" by his company's new phone, and boasted of features that were "super-available" and "super-consistent."
No comments:
Post a Comment