{"id":332026,"date":"2010-02-17T09:26:08","date_gmt":"2010-02-17T14:26:08","guid":{"rendered":"tag:business.theatlantic.com,2010:\/\/3.36083"},"modified":"2010-02-17T09:39:37","modified_gmt":"2010-02-17T14:39:37","slug":"att-gets-another-big-win-with-microsoft-windows-phone-7","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/332026","title":{"rendered":"AT&T Gets Another Big Win With Microsoft Windows Phone 7"},"content":{"rendered":"

This week, Microsoft showcased its new Windows Phone 7 platform at the World Mobile Conference in Barcelona. One part of its announcement that hasn’t gotten enough attention is its decision to name AT&T its “premier partner” in the U.S. I think this is hugely significant for two reasons: it shows AT&T isn’t content with just Apple and further develops alliances in the wireless industry.<\/p>\n

Over at PC World, Tony Bradley notes<\/a> how big a win this is for AT&T: <\/p>\n

One of the most interesting things about the unveiling of the new Windows Phone 7 platform by Microsoft at the World Mobile Conference was the announcement that AT&T will be Microsoft’s “premier partner” in the United States. As much flack as AT&T takes from customers and media, it is still the “chosen one” for premier smartphone platforms.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

I would add that it’s also impressive from a diversity of partners point of view. Not many in the tech industry can brag about holding hands with both Apple and Microsoft simultaneously. That makes up a huge portion of the mobile platform market, with the most notable competition now just phones running the Google Android platform (it already has a significant Blackberry offering). But AT&T also recently announced<\/a> that it was planning on introducing some Android-based phones as well, so that might not be much of a probably either.<\/p>\n

If you assumed that Apple was dropping AT&T, then it might make sense for the carrier to make a deal with Microsoft — to make sure the service provider isn’t left without a strong partner. But as I recently noted<\/a>, Apple’s choice of keeping AT&T as the iPad data provider shows that the AT&T-Apple partnership doesn’t appear to be weakening. Assuming that Apple does stick with AT&T, the wireless company will be in a very strong position. <\/p>\n

This decision by Microsoft also further delineates the alliances in the wireless industry. Now you’ve sort of got Verizon-Google versus AT&T-Apple-Microsoft. Of course, even then there will inevitably be some Verizon phones that run Microsoft’s Windows Phone 7 and some AT&T phones than run Google’s Android. But it’s clear that the Verizon-Google and AT&T-Windows relationships will be stronger. Other service providers like Sprint and T-mobile aren’t beaten yet, but they haven’t managed to grab the attention of these big name software companies like Verizon and AT&T. <\/p>\n

This all makes for a mobile phone market that should keep evolving quickly, due to the intense competition we’re seeing between these big service providers. Just yesterday, I mentioned<\/a> that Verizon has decided to work with Skype, a measure that AT&T will almost certainly feel forced to respond to. Even though the market appears to be gravitating towards a small oligopoly of just a few big names, the competition continues to be fierce.<\/p>\n



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This week, Microsoft showcased its new Windows Phone 7 platform at the World Mobile Conference in Barcelona. One part of its announcement that hasn’t gotten enough attention is its decision to name AT&T its “premier partner” in the U.S. I think this is hugely significant for two reasons: it shows AT&T isn’t content with just […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1535,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-332026","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/332026","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1535"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=332026"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/332026\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=332026"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=332026"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=332026"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}