Verizon's CEO says carriers are warming up to "a third ecosystem", expects it to be Windows Phone
When the CEO of the largest US carrier talks, everyone in the mobile industry should listen, since the US market has superior visibility, making it somewhat of a trendsetter recently.
Speaking at the Goldman Sachs Communacopia event yesterday, Lowell McAdam, the CEO of Verizon, had expressed his beliefs that in the next 12 months Windows Phone will win the battle with RIM for the "third ecosystem" to take on Android and iOS.
Besides RIM's QNX and Windows Phone, he had also mentioned Samsung's bada as having a fighting chance, but the ultimate winner he believes to be Microsoft. Scoring Nokia as its de facto handset manufacturing arm this year, must have tipped the scales in Redmond's favor:
The carriers are beginning to coalesce around the need for a third ecosystem. Over the next 12 months I think it will coalesce and you will start to see one emerge as a legitimate third ecosystem. In my opinion, it’ll be between RIM and Microsoft, and I expect Microsoft to come out victorious.
Microsoft itself, however, is not completely convinced it will pull it off. An anonymous blogger under the name of Mini-Microsoft (from Mini-Me, of course), who claims to be mid-manager at the company, has posted some internal memos from a high-ranking employee online, which reveal his honest take on the whole mobile saga:
WP7 is a good product but as others have alluded to, MSFT is way late to the party in terms of highly functional / attractive UI / rich app eco-system smartphones. The Nokia deal only allows MSFT some hope at playing catch-up at this point
The US is a nation where the carriers call the shots, and if the largest one has a mindset that Windows Phone will be bi-winning in the next year or so in the battle for the third place and for the carriers' hearts, then Nokia, Samsung, HTC, LG and the other WP warriors might just start putting some extra effort in their Windows Phones.
source: FierceWireless & Mini-Microsoft
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