James Faucette, an analyst at Pacific Crest Securities, thought that Nokia would easily sell over 2 million Windows Phones by the end of this year. After doing some sell-through checks however, he revised his estimates down to just 500,000 units. Not exactly the type of news the Finnish handset maker needs right now. Faucette’s latest estimates sent Nokia’s share price down over 7% yesterday, which again, is likely making Stephen Elop look like an asshole over in Espoo. Now we’re not actually going to be able to call Faucette’s numbers out until Nokia posts their Q4 2011 numbers, hopefully sometime in late January, but something tells us that Nokia isn’t going to break down their smartphone shipments by operating system. How embarrassing would it be to see the Nokia N9 out performing the Lumia 800?
Is it too early to judge Nokia’s commitment to Windows Phone? Absolutely. They only have one device out on the market, the lower priced 710 has yet to ship, and they’re competing against two well entrenched players in just a handful of Western European countries. When Nokia launches Windows Phone hardware in the United States and Asia, things will change. We’re also fairly confident that Windows Phone isn’t going to take off until Apollo comes out in the second half of 2012, but that’s OK since it gives Nokia’s engineers time to really take advantage of their unique access to the guts of Microsoft’s mobile operating system.
And don’t forget about Windows 8. Microsoft’s going to promote their new tile based operating system harder than anyone can imagine, and when people see that there’s a mobile OS that looks and feels exactly like they’re desktop, then they’ll likely give Windows Phone the chance it deserves to succeed. Failure is not an option for Microsoft, and they’ll make sure they break double digit smartphone market share, regardless of how much it’ll cost them.
Just look at Bing.