Thursday, March 20, 2003

Bill Gates' Web Site - Speech Transcript, 2003 Mobility Developers Conference

Bill Gates' Web Site - Speech Transcript, 2003 Mobility Developers Conference "Now, the Smartphone is a new form factor for us that gets us down to the high volume arena, with the smaller screen size and, therefore, a smaller overall device. We have some experience with the Smartphone primarily in Europe where it's been growing. The average revenue per user is up 15 percent above any previous device, and the data services are driving 90 percent of that gain. There is actually some gain in the other forms of uses as well. Smartphone users are more loyal, that is there's lower churn, partly because they put onto their device a lot of very important data that they have. And so the switching cost on top of that carrier relationship are much higher than they would be otherwise. We're seeing that the voice and SMS revenue actually not only hold up, but go up slightly, and then you see these additional data activities driven by the rich applications that are connected there.
Another point, and this is a piece of measurement in the United States. In this market, of all these PDAs, platform devices, a 55 percent share of those are the Windows-based devices, and so we also have Palm and Simian. Palm, all of the different people who manufacture based on theirs, likewise for Simian. But we have a significantly higher share than either of them with the majority of that market.
Now, to be clear, Microsoft is just at the beginning of what it's doing in this business. We've said that about many businesses before, and I think we have a very strong track record of credibility when we say we're going to invest that we do that, and follow-through, literally, for decades in evolving the platform in a very compatible way, making it work with all the different things that it needs to work with."

(Fun transcription error -- "Simian" instead of "Symbian"... His point: 55% of wide-area wireless PDAs in the US are now Windows CE/Pocket PC)

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