Stephen A. Elop
Analyst · Mike Walkley with Canaccord Genuity
Thanks for the question. Of course, at the end of the day, to your opening comment, consumers get to decide. But of course, having operators support the training, the incentives with sales people, the live devices in their hands and so forth can help to influence that and our studies have made that pretty clear. So of course, time will tell, but the consumers do ultimately get to decide. As it relates to the different platforms, our clear focus for a broad ecosystem offering is with Windows Phone. That's what we're doing. The offering with Series 40, I tend not to think about it as the same breadth of ecosystem or capability that you would see with either a fully functional Android device or fully functional Windows Phone devices. You get down to those lower and lower price points. The actual capability tend to diminish. Or actually said from a consumer perspective, the things that they're trying to do, the focus areas of their interaction, tend to narrow somewhat, in large part because of data constraints. So for example, Facebook, simple Internet browsing, messaging of some form, if you're on a BlackBerry device, it might be BBM, it might be WhatsApp and so forth. And so what we actually expect to see is, yes, windows Phone prices will be pushed down and you'll see product offerings that take us lower and lower in price point. But we also think across the low band of prices, we have an opportunity for very cost-conscious consumers to give them a beautifully designed device at significantly lower prices, that gives them some of the basic smartphone capabilities, as well as the ability to download certain forms of apps and so forth. But at those price points, it's still quite a while at the lowest price points before things like true multitasking and other things that typify either Android or Windows Phone come into play. So there's a lot of different dynamics there to consider. Final comment on your question, you're right that the tendency from west to east is that operators have less influence. However, in the vast majority of countries, the trend is towards more and more operator influence. We're seeing more of that in virtually every country. And that is certainly the case. I've used China as an example, where over the last 18 months, the operators have significantly changed the dynamics, particularly at lower price points, as they have driven programs to increase the number of subscribers at the expense of profitability.