It’s been an exciting week for Microsoft in telecoms

By Helen Hughes

You’ve no doubt heard that we’ve revealed the Windows Phone 7 Series at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona. The show’s been buzzing with the news ever since and so many people are asking us about it.

 

The phone has been designed to give customers the best experience by working in the same way people do and we’ve brought together things like Zune for music and Xbox Live for games. People get access to what they really care about from the web, music, gaming, and applications.

 

I won’t talk about it too much here but you should have a look at the Windows Team blog, it’s got a lot of great demos from Joe Belfiore and the team who worked so closely on it and they’re better placed to talk about it than me.

 

What makes this really interesting for me is that it’s another step forward in our strategy of partnering with service providers. When we can introduce something truly new like this, the excitement from both consumers and partners is palpable.

 

Over the last 5 years, we’ve been partnering with service providers to help them work out how they can continue to make money when the worlds of communications and information consumption are changing so quickly. We’ve been working on lots of different options with them, which includes everything from the set up of their back office to marketing strategies that see operators worldwide offering Windows powered Netbooks through a typical service plan. Last year, operators shipped 8 million Netbooks running Windows. Operators we’ve announced we’re working with include Verizon, AT&T, Vodafone and SFR.

 

We don’t just provide our own software, we have a thriving ecosystem of industry SIs and ISVs who we support on their own development, so we can offer a plethora of services. We also work with the partners like Convergys, RedKnee and MetraTech to support the delivery of these next generation services, all of which we’ve announced this week. It may sound like the back end of telecoms - it’s not a shiny new gadget - but it’s absolutely essential if you want to be able to offer all these great new services and collect the revenue from them.

 

It’s an exciting time to be at Microsoft and an exciting time to be in telecoms. Drop me a line, I’d be interested to hear what your thoughts are on everything you’ve heard from us at MWC.