Last week, I looked at the share of the SmartPhone market held between the two operating system leaders, Symbian and Microsoft. In that battle, Microsoft was being battered and outsold by 8 to 1.
I didn’t examine too closely the Linux position as it was very much a niche play according to the stats I had at the time, though I did predict that this might change.
But latest Gartner stats show that Linux is now bigger than Microsoft, accounting for 14% of shipments in Q1 2005 vs Microsoft’s meager 4.5% share.
SmartPhones are the fastest growing sector of the market and is forecast to account for 200 million handsets in 2008. But, there’s more to this sector than just raw numbers. The real power-users and opinion leaders in mobile all have SmartPhones. I do. You probably do too – and if you don’t, my guess is that you’re unusual among readers of MobHappy. Drop me a comment if I’m wildly wrong here 
This means that Microsoft are loosing the battle for the hearts and minds in the SmartPhone sector, if they haven’t already lost it already anyway.
This puts Microsoft in an incredibly bleak position in the mobile world, which will become bleaker still when they finally realise that the mobile will do to them, what they did to the mainframe – accessing the digital world by PC in 10 years (maybe less) will be a minor eccentricity, like hand writing a letter now if you’re under 20.
So what can they do? With plenty of cash, I think they’ll have to buy a handset manufacturer and lever their way into the market that way. The current strategy clearly isn’t working and there’s no real future for them in sticking to the PC. It would be like a buggy whip maker doggedly continuing to turn out buggy whips in the early years of the last century in the face of a market about to embrace the motor car.
Who will it be? Motorola or Sony Ericsson would be my bets, but what do I know?
Image from projects.Linux.Wine
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