Lies, damn lies and sensationalist headlines – Samsung and Windows Mobile
The online news world was yesterday abuzz with news of Samsung dropping Windows Mobile, to such a degree that Samsung senior vice president Don Joo Lee had to actually come out and explicitly deny it.
In an interview with Digitimes he made it clear that Samsung Electronics will continue to use Windows Mobile- and Android-based platforms for new smartphones launched in 2010, but will in fact drop Symbian and use a new in-house developed operating system they called Bada in its place.
So where did the Windows Mobile hating blogosphere get the idea Samsung was dropping Windows Mobile? It of course came from uber-Microsoft hating Electronista, with its thrilling headline Samsung may deal Microsoft severe blow. I’m sure the editor from the site that hosts MacNN had a small orgasm when the clicked the publish button.
The source of the rumour was an investment note by HMC Investment Securities, which claims Samsung will increase their use of Android next year (no surprise) and projects that this trend will continue. The graph also shows Samsung dropping Symbian next year and introducing their own OS. HMC’s graph further goes on to show Samsung’s proprietary OS rapidly outpacing both Windows Mobile and Android share to become the majority of handsets shipped in 2012.
Now there are a number of ways this could have been reported. Certainly the most pertinent would have been “Samsung set to drop Symbian” but of course US awareness of Symbian is largely non-existent, and everyone knows Windows Mobile hating headlines get many more clicks. Symbian was therefore replaced with Windows Mobile, without even a proper analysis of the original Telecom Korea article.
On top is one graph that caused a lot of the excitement. The dark blue line clearly shows Windows Mobile heading into obscurity.
A proper reading of the article however reveals that Samsung claims to have doubled smartphone sales between 2008 and 2008, and expects to do the same in 2010, with sales of around 5 million in 2008, 9 million in 2009 and 21 million in 2010.
When the graph is adjusted for this important data we get Windows Mobile shipments doubling between 2008 and 2010. In fact the article clearly says HMC expects to ship 20 Windows Mobile handsets in 2010, which is a handly a small number.
As mentioned earlier, even by HMC’s account Windows Mobile hardly seems in trouble, and the fact is that Samsung expects its Bada OS to move more into the feature phone market than the traditional smartphone arena, thereby expanding the market for all. The headline everyone ran with yesterday is clearly a product of Macophile bloggers intent on seeing Microsoft fail, and has rarely been so far removed from the facts or reality. We have seen a similar response to the HTC HD2, which by all unbiased accounts is a great handset, but has been put down by sites like Gizmodo and other for simply running Windows Mobile, thereby likely scaring of many first time users who may have enjoyed the device very much and damaging HTC’s sales, which creates a self-fulfilling prophesy.
I will not be wasting my and the readers time with lengthy articles like this again any time soon, but I urge our readers to examine the propaganda-filled articles from major tech sites very carefully, and counter the sensationalist lies where they find them with the facts instead.
In the mean time lets retweet this article and pass the truth along as far as we can, because those major sites will certainly not be picking this story up.
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Indeed. The major tech news blogs are the epitome of the echo chamber effect. It's a great non-stop source of publicity if you're one of their chosen beloved companies (i.e., Apple, Google) but also a non-stop source of slander if you're a company they don't like (i.e., Microsoft.)
What's sad/scary though is the amount of real-world power these sites wield. Remember when Engadget made a post about a potential iPhone delay and Apple's stock tanked that day before slowly recovering. That was a major instant impact with real world ramifications – and all the proof you need that our stock market is managed by clueless monkeys too lazy to build their own connections. But without a doubt their most powerful impact comes in the long-term opinion making their posts and 'reviews' generate in the sea of Google results. Do a search for virtually any major handset in the last couple years and you'll find a Gizmodo and Engadget post/review in the top 3-4 results the VAST majority of the time. While I actually enjoy reading both of those sites for geeky entertainment, I also know these sites are not exactly the bastion of integrity (to make just a weee bit of an understatement.) But the average joe just doing some initial research on a phone/etc that he's considering doesn't know that. He doesn't know that these guys are basically just raving fanboys participating in the circle jerk with their fanboy friends on other sites in the echo chamber and will take their word at face value. Multiply that effect by tens of millions of people doing the same types of searches and suddenly you have people formulating extreme opinions for/against something without ever even laying hands on the product themselves. It's the old 'don't believe everything you read in the newspaper' adage transformed for the modern era, multiplied by a million.
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dloendorf Reply:
November 11th, 2009 at 10:00 pm
I am in 100% agreement
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Very good analytical and technical fact checking article. Kudos
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It's exactly as I suspected (and posted as comment on 'that other news site'). Thanks for the great piece and the confirmation!
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Great write up, site's like Gizmodo make me sick with their Apple fanyboism, I used to think Engadget was bad but Gizmodo take the biscuit. Seem's like Engadget like the HD2 though which is great.
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But the HD2 is the last twitch of a dying system and no amount of HTC sense will polish that turd.
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Chris Reply:
November 11th, 2009 at 10:09 pm
Maybe, but as a last twitch its a good one since its the best smartphone there is.
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Heck Yeah, i read just pieces of the actual information and nowhere did it point at Samsung "Dumping" WM.
Also it would be ilogical to put all your money on one OS.
But yet another Apps Store…. ungh, stop it.
And i'm also tired of all that "Dying System" when it comes to WinMo.
Let MS take their time to make a solid framework to build on top of the years after release of WinMo 7. I'd rather it not becoming another Vista like debacle.
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I have enjoyed this site and encourgae you to keep up the great reporting!
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Thanks for a sensible voice in the "babble" that has been going on around Windows Mobile the last 6 months
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Well, there was one post here in wmpoweruser indicating that in Samsung's homeland of South Korea, 80% are running WM. Who but a deranged CEO would cut that out?!?
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It’s deranged to think Samsung, hardware specialists, can come out with a new OS that works. This is not a toy that you can just code up on a weekend and it’ll work great. It’s a really hard problem that’s been worked on for the last 30 years and it’s still not that easy.
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I think the original claim about Samsung dumping Windows Mobile is true.
Samsung is planning to reduce the proportion of WinMo handsets to other handsets. Now, we can argue (like above) that the projected market will be bigger, and WinMo's smaller proportion still means more WinMo handsets. However, if we are going to look at which platforms will win or lose, and which will live or die, it is the platform's proportion of sales that is most important.
With its declining proportions at Samsung, it's still obvious that Samsung is reducing Windows Mobile's importance compared to the other OSes. That still makes very bad news for Windows Mobile. If we look at the proportion of Windows Mobile handset sales across the whole smartphone industry, we have WinMo dropping to 7.9% this month (according to Gartner). That puts Windows Mobile on life support.
Proportion and percentage is what is important, not handset numbers. Proportion will determine which platforms that software developers make programs for. That's why Windows Mobile is attracting so few developers to its app store.
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Proportion and percentage is what is important, not handset numbers. Proportion will determine which platforms that software developers make programs for. That's why Windows Mobile is attracting so few developers to its app store.
and you call yourself an analyst ROTFLOL
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