Barely five years have passed since the launch of the somewhat-promising Windows Phone, but if Microsoft’s new sales figures are any indication, the death of the smartphone operating system is imminent.
Microsoft’s Q2 2016 figures are in (their financial year ends in June), and they have revealed that in the three months of their fiscal quarter, they sold just 4.5 million Lumia phones. The figure pales in comparison even next to the 10.5 million Lumias sold last year in the same quarter. Combined, Nokia and Microsoft have sold just 110 million Lumias in the past five years since the launch of the Lumia lineup by Nokia. To put that figure in perspective, Apple and Android manufacturers have sold nearly 4.5 billion Androids and iPhones combined in exactly the same period of time. In 2015 alone, Apple sold more iPhones (257 million) than Microsoft or Nokia ever did with the Lumia in it’s whole lifetime.
However, the figures shouldn’t really come as a surprise as they are basically an accurate reflection of the abysmal state windows phone is in right now. Although a handful of manufacturers like Samsung and HTC have tried their hand at making Windows Phones, Nokia was the only one that managed to sell a decent lot of units with its Lumia phones. Even when Microsoft bought Nokia and relaunched its Lumia lineup, it couldn’t quite convince many people to buy their phones, as evident by the recent sale figures.
Introduced in 2010 as a successor to the aging Windows Mobile (Microsoft’s older smartphone OS), the Windows Phone was the software-giant’s way of trying to fight off the increasing spread of Google’s Android and Apple’s iPhone. The company, led by Steve Ballmer back then, kept up a steady flow of updates and tried to introduce some unique software features like Windows-integration (read: Continuum), but they came a little too late and weren’t really good enough to pull in users of Android or iOS.
Source – Evans
