msmobiles.com - Microsoft pushes Taiwanese hardware manufacturers to reduce price for Pocket PC phones to sub-$300 region

msmobiles.com - Microsoft pushes Taiwanese hardware manufacturers to reduce price for Pocket PC phones to sub-$300 regionMicrosoft pushes Taiwanese hardware manufacturers to reduce price for Pocket PC phones to sub-$300 region
December 09, 2005 [Pocket PC phone]
Nokia is advertising their Symbian smartphones together with their regular non-smartphone phones - thus creating synergy effect. Nokia spends hundreds of millions of $ for advertising of mobile phones too. Nokia also reuses components from regular phones in smartphones, what results in economy of scale effect.

Maybe instead of forcing poor manufacturers to reduce costs (and compromise quality?), Microsoft should use above mentioned effects, particularly synergy effect: Microsoft should embed advertising of Windows Mobile into existing marketing campaigns of other Microsoft products (like operating systems, office software, database software, etc).... Read on!

Digitimes - Chinese publication in English language - has direct access to press in Chinese language (that is used also in Taiwan) so they know well the situation among hardware manufacturers there. Apparently Microsoft wants to force poor hardware manufacturers from Taiwan to produce cheap Pocket PC phones:

Microsoft plans to team up with Taiwan ODM handset makers and own-brand handset vendors to manufacture sub-US$300 PDA phones in a bid to help the company expand its share of the global OS (operating system) market for mobile devices, according to sources at Taiwan makers and vendors.