Gartner: Microsoft’s brand is a problem in mobile, and Nokia may be the solution

Gartner analyst Roberta Cozza believes if Microsoft is to see more success in mobile they needed to do significant work on their brand.

"One of the biggest challenges we pointed out in our research is the perception of the brand, but I think that today there is more of an emotional link from consumers to the Windows phone brand."

"There is a lot of confusion within Microsoft because they have the Xbox, Skype and other services and products that feel like they’re separate one from the other," said Cozza.

"They need to tie together all those services as more of a single entity, instead of many different planets of services."

Cozza believes that features such as Nokia’s PureView, could fuse with Microsoft’s already technically respectable Windows Phone platform to create something the consumer doesn’t have already, while providing the enterprise with an "Apple equivalent" simply because businesses are "still wary" about Android’s shaky reputation from a security standpoint.

Success, she felt, depended on if Microsoft "will let the Nokia people they keep give feedback on the device," leading to "better opportunities to better integrate the OS and the hardware".

"They need to bring together more what they have," she said. "This next year is so fundamental for them to change this perception around. They have a strong gaming brand, and Skype, and I think we need to see more of a branding. Tablet users use them mainly for entertainment – and Microsoft needs to work on the brand to take that into account."

Talking about Microsoft’s new CEO, she said "It could help if it’s a person who understands the importance of, and the execution of mobile, and it should be a person who also understands devices now that Microsoft wants to compete – and rightly so – by being more of a hardware company."

The Nokia brand is widely believed to have kick-started Windows Phone adoption in Europe, Asia and Latin America, but it is believed Microsoft intends to drop much of that branding from the phone division when it takes it over in early 2014, retaining only the Lumia brand. 

Via Computing.co.uk