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Comment by CurtHagenlocher | Hacker News Reader

Obligatory snark: this will double the WinPhone8 installed base!

Disclaimer: I work at Microsoft but left the company meeting early.

Response to snark (which I don't know why you think was obligatory):

PC World reports 5.4 million Windows Phone 7s sold this quarter alone (http://www.pcworld.com/article/262287/windows_phone_fails_to...). With 94,000 employees, this would increase Windows Phone sales by 1.7% in a single quarter, and be a much smaller percentage of installed base.

WP7 != WP8

AFAIK there is no official WP8 user base yet?

Correct... and?

So your reply about the wp7 userbase size was irrelevant to the discussion.

Do you believe that was a misleading statistic to use to give a general idea of the scale of the inaccuracy of the original comment? Sorry I'm being short in all these replies, I'm tired of and choosing to call people out on unconstructive snark and pedantry.

I thought it pointed out how accurate its hyperbole was :) 1.7% is huge.

I should have said "preemptive" rather than "obligatory".

I think WinPhone is a great product, but there's no denying that it's been a bit of a laggard in the market.

Usually people attach preemptive snark to otherwise constructive contributions. Otherwise it's just snark.

Laggard? Maybe. But the thing Microsoft usually gets right is finding success in iterations.

I like WP7/8 myself, but my household is mostly Apple products for simplicity of integration and my preference for things based on Unix.

Did he announce that all employees are getting WP8 devices or just American employees (~45k)? Given that subsidies are not common outside of the US, I'm thinking only 1%. We only just recently got our WP7 devices here in China (I work for Microsoft China).

I still have not seen a Windows Phone device in the wild; I hope our market share is much better in the states!

Ask your boss. Not here.

It will take them awhile to figure this out. I just meant to say that when they announce these, it might not affect 90K worldwide employees right away, its more like the 40K in USA/Redmond + figure out how to handle in each other country based on unique circumstances (availability, taxes, etc...).

Meeting was webcasted around the world (within MSFT).

Ah! Did they do a reasonable time delay for each market? Some of us need to sleep.

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