When you are entering a fiercely competitive market late, you better either have a unique product that changes everything, or enough money to promote your device like your life depends on it. While Windows Phone 7 may be a unique product, Microsoft is also throwing a boatload of cash behind its platform.
TechCrunch reports that “Jonathan Goldberg, an analyst at Deutsche Bank, estimates that Microsoft will spend $400 million on marketing alone for the Windows Phone 7 launch. That doesn’t include the millions it has already committed to pay for ‘non-recurring engineering’ costs that help offset development costs for handset manufacturers.”
It shouldn’t come really as a surprise that Microsoft is going to throw all of its weight behind the platform. For WP7 to have any chance at competing with Blackberry OS, iOS and Android, it will need all the help it can get.
If you’re thinking that this may not work, Microsoft has proven that this strategy does work. Several years ago when the original Xbox debuted, many thought it wouldn’t stand a chance against Sony and Nintendo’s offerings. However, if you look at the current marketplace today, you surely know that Microsoft has firmly planted itself into the home console genre and has been quite successful with it too. Microsoft relied on its ability to completely saturate a market, marketing and pushing a product to every home it has access to, and overwhelming the competition with numbers. It looks like Microsoft will be taking the same route with WP7.
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