At Microsoft’s annual shareholders meeting, Steve Ballmer showed off a lot of what Microsoft are doing and how the renovation of the company seems to be for the best. Last week we found that Windows had sold 40M licenses, and this week we found Microsoft are selling four times as many phones this year.
While again we are without precious figures to analyze against other companies, it looks like Windows 8 phone is doing well in the early stages. Nokia have already reported an apparent three million Lumia 920 sales, a good solid number. HTC have not really talked about their model, we believe it may have been another poor shot for HTC.
Interestingly, Ballmer has kept away from Surface and Windows RT again, as the search for a good RT tablet continues. Right now, Surface is the only real solid Windows RT product and it has sufficient problems that we have talked about. It seems while Windows 8 licenses may be going fast, sales on PC’s may be a slump.
Asus CFO said yesterday that demand for their Windows 8 devices was quite poor now – with Asus being one of the main manufacturers of Windows 8, we suspect that this poor demand line will run through all the OEM partners.
This is the second time Asus have been the company to go against Windows 8 and the shrouded success. Speaking a few months back, Asus said they had halted their Windows RT tablet launches due to poor Surface reviews. We suspect that Asus are starting to pull away from Windows 8, as more mixed views surface.
According to Ballmer, the amount of Windows 8 devices has grown from an impressive 1,000 to 1,500 between the launch and now. This seems good, but it just makes us wonder how many of these devices will actually reach good sales.
There are also 120,000 apps on the Windows Phone Store right now, around 100,000 more than on the Windows 8 store platform. We suspect that while this figure is not pulled from nowhere, most of those apps would not pass the Apple review process.