Microsoft is expecting a bumper 2005 in the portable operating systems space, forecasting 2.5 times more Windows CE licence sales in SA next year.
Jonathan Hatchuel, Microsoft SA`s product and solutions marketing manager, says demand for the Windows CE-related products has shown strong growth as companies extend their networks to incorporate mobile applications, and the number of cellular phones using the operating system steadily increases.
"We believe we are growing faster than the market growth and are taking some ground away from our competitors," he says.
Hatchuel`s comments come on the back of a report by international research firm Gartner that worldwide personal digital assistant (PDA) shipments exceeded 2.8 million units, with Microsoft Windows CE operating system licences surpassing the Palm OS for the first time in the third quarter of 2004.
The Microsoft Windows CE operating system accounted for 48.1% of the operating systems in worldwide PDA shipments in the third quarter of 2004. Palm OS units represented 29.8% of the market, down from 46.9% market share in the same period last year.
[TABLE 1]"The robust Microsoft Windows CE market has been driven in part by the wide choice of vendors," says Todd Knort, principal analyst in Gartner`s Computing Platforms Worldwide group. "Business customers tend to steer clear of markets dominated by a single supplier, which is where the Palm OS market stands today."
He says a decline in Palm OS shipments was expected in the third quarter of 2004, but not of this magnitude.
"The company is pouring the vast majority of its resources into its smartphone business. A reduction is expected next year in the number of PDA models PalmOne offers," Knort says.
PalmOne continued to lead the worldwide market in PDA hardware shipments, but its shipments declined 13.3% in the third quarter of 2004. PalmOne`s market share totalled 26.2%, but Hewlett-Packard and Research In Motion showed substantial increases in shipments in the third quarter of 2003.
[TABLE 2]Knort says demand for wireless e-mail continues to increase as the primary driver of new PDA deployments. The shipment growth of Research In Motion nearly balances the decline of Palm OS, Linux, Symbian and proprietary PDAs.
But Palm Source, the company that develops Palm OS, does not seem to be taking the news lying down. At the recent Gartner Symposium and ITXpo in the US state of Florida it demonstrated a number of collaboration projects it has under way with other vendors such as IBM and Blackberry.
Approximately 35 million Palm-powered handhelds and smartphones have been sold to date worldwide. Companies such as Aceeca, AlphaSmart, Fossil, Garmin, GSL, Kyocera, Lenovo, palmOne, QTech, Samsung, Sony, Symbol Technologies and Tapwave license Palm OS to create diverse mobile devices that meet customer needs.
"We expect worldwide PDA shipments to total 11.9 million units in 2004, up approximately 4% from 2003," Knort says.
Microsoft SA`s Hatchuel says retail sales of devices using Windows CE in SA have not been as buoyant as he would have liked.
"The problem is with the high staff turnover in the retail environment that makes training difficult and the hardware vendors are developing new models very quickly," he says.
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