Windows Phone to become no. 2 Mobile OS in India, soon: Vineet Durani, Microsoft India [Interview]
MG: How is Windows Phone OS performing in India ?
MG: One of the challenges before Microsoft is the lesser number of apps available on Windows Phone. How is Microsoft dealing with it?
Vineet Durani:
- Windows Phone has a robust store with 125,000 apps. These apps deliver the highest quality experience to the consumer. All important apps which are most used by smart phone users are available.
- Our ecosystem is growing rapidly with a majority of big players in the industry.
- We’re seeing thousands of Indian developers actively building apps for Windows Phone. With the industry-leading revenue terms offered by the Windows Store, we expect we’ll see even more great apps make their way to the Windows Store – and a new generation of developers.
Any ecosystem takes a while for people wanting to write applications, if you look at the genesis of any other ecosystem, Windows Phone has reached this destination faster than any other ecosystem. And now because of ecosystem shifts, Angry Birds and Star Wars went live on Windows 8, Windows Phone 8, iOS and Android at the same time across the world.
MG: What is Microsoft doing to bring in more developers to the platform?
Vineet Durani: We have a large number of programs that we run for developers to enable them to get skilled and trained for developing the apps on our platform. There is also a Windows Phone 8 SDK available for Unity which is usually the most prevalent platform to build games. The other thing which we do is that we help local developers to market their apps on our Windows Phone Store, so when you access that Windows Phone store you will see a bunch of apps that are featured apps or apps which are merchandized in the spotlight for any particular day. This entire merchandising is done by Microsoft for each market and is localized for each market.
MG: Currently you have a very few OEM partners. Can we see a better number in coming months?
Vineet Durani: The way to look at this is that do we have large enough product portfolio available across price segments. Our partners Nokia, HTC and Samsung have an array of devices that are available across the price segment from below Rs. 10,000 to Rs. 40000 approx. We do work with some of the other OEM partners who are not present in India but in other countries. Our constant endeavour is to look for partners who offer us best hardware for the operating system so as to deliver a great experience for the consumer.