Windows Phone 7 Trumps Apple, Android: Ex-Microsoft Exec

From eWeek: It’s the smartphone market, stupid. That’s the point of view from one Windows Phone 7 evangelist and former Microsoft employee, who wrote a long blog post lamenting poor sales of the Microsoft smartphones and the success of inferior products like Google Android-powered devices and Apple’s iPhone. The comments came from Charlie Kindel, a 21-year Microsoft veteran who most recently led the Windows Phone partner program and recently left to found his own startup.

Kindel argues Android devices encourage fragmentation, which reduces friction between carriers and device manufacturers but ultimately hurts consumers. Apple, by removing device manufacturers from Kindel’s four-sided smartphone marketplace (carriers, device manufacturers, OS providers and users), is trying to turn the carriers into “even more of a fat dumb pipe,” which will eventually come back to bite them.

Microsoft, he claims, by dictating hardware specifications and software update specs to the device manufacturers and mobile carriers, respectively, is producing a virtuous cycle where the various players in the market give and receive positive value from their partners in the ecosystem. Google has managed to be a success, not because it’s a better product, he argues, but because Android fragmentation allows carriers and retail sales professionals (RSPs) to reduce friction between the manufacturing and carrier sides of the market.

“Spending marketing dollars advertising WP7 requires Microsoft to push hard on the carriers,” he blogged. “Getting RSPs to push WP7 requires Microsoft to push hard on the carriers to incent their RSPs correctly.”

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