Comms: Microsoft buys mobile market monopoly - maybe

Leading the pack is HTC: their Kuala Lumpur City Centre branch on Sunday had an entire wall given over to Windows 7 Mobile devices. And yesterday, the company announced that its first Win7M specific device will be launched in time for the Christmas market.

It's important that it's HTC that is pushing Win7M so aggressively because HTC is the prime exponent of Android. The Desire with Froyo is a match for the iPhone in so many ways, even the much loved 3GS. And the new HD variant is a stunning phone.

Competitors in the mobile arena have started from a different place to Microsoft. Apples iOS, Symbian, Android are all primarily phone-based that do computer stuff. Microsoft started with a computer and tried to make it do phone stuff.

Windows has had remarkably (by its own objectives) little success in the mobile market. Even with the support of major manufacturers, and pushed to the business market (due to the interchange with e.g. Microsoft Exchange) it has failed to get a 10% share. When it moved to mobile, the company targeted as much as 70% share.

The cult of the Blackberry, which Microsoft has failed to kill by marketing or litigation, has dented the company's business market share. And then came the iPod with its ability to handle not just e-mails but also social media.

Whether Win7M is actually any good remains to be seen.

But given that Windows 7 is, at least in our use, the best windows since 3.1, there is at last a decent platform for MS to work on.

Of course Win7M is not Win7. Its links are tenuous. But if the core is stable and the important bits work without crashing, then there's a chance it will have success.

It's the crashing thing that's most important. Windows and Symbian users have, historically, had to reboot their phones often. That's something Apple and Android users rarely have to do: indeed, unless one lets an HTC Desire run out of battery, turning it off puts it into a sleep mode for very fast restart. Seemingly, it might be possible never to actually reboot it. But time will tell as the system gets filled up with data and apps. Certainly, that has not been a problem for iPhone 3 users.

And in the meantime, the onslaught of Windows marketing is being unleashed with an estimated budget of above the line advertising alone of USD400 million in the next four months bringing in Christmas and Chinese New Year, both key sales periods.

MS needs to make this work: it has invested heavily in the product but its shares have slipped some 20% so far this year - bizarre given that it has, at last, released a good operating system even if it did pinch much of its look and feel from various Linux installations and Mac programmes. But it's under the bonnet that Win 7 scores.

It needs to get that message over to mobile buyers because, unlike Symbian and Android, it charges phone manufacturers a licence fee to install the software. That puts the onus on manufacturers to find a way to equalise the price they charge for Android and Win7M phones for the simple reason that consumers will look at the price tag, remember how poor former mobile Windows products were and need to be sold on the "benefits" of Win7M.

For those whose friends already have an iPhone or an Android based phone, that's going to be a hard sell.