Microsoft (NSDQ: MSFT) has confirmed that next Monday is the day it will unveil its Windows Phone 7 line-up at a press conference in New York with Microsoft’s CEO Steve Ballmer, joined by AT&T (NYSE: T) Mobility’s CEO Ralph de la Vega. According to an invitation sent to mocoNews, the event will also include a product showcase to explore the various features of the phone, including Zune, Bing, Xbox and more.
Ballmer’s job at the event is to do his best to convince everyone that Microsoft finally has a compelling story in mobile again. It won’t be easy. The company has essentially been sitting out the past year from the mobile industry, and has had a number of recent missteps that doesn’t exactly ooze confidence. The company launched the KIN mobile phone, only to slash it a couple of months later. Meanwhile, it’s lost a number of executives overseeing the division.
In a Q&A with the WSJ, Ballmer admits there were mistakes: “We had some execution issues from an R&D perspective. In the time frame since the last significant release certainly the industry has moved, the technology has moved, the hardware has moved….We said, we’ve got to move forward, not shoot for yesterday. We’ve got to shoot ahead in a way that’s delightful to users, accessible to developers and prioritize everything else we do around those elements.”
One of the reasons Ballmer believes Microsoft can make a comeback is because of the radical amount of change that’s taking place in the industry. For instance, if Android’s market share can increase 12 percentage points to 15 percent since the end of last year (while both RIM (NSDQ: RIMM) and Apple (NSDQ: AAPL) lost share), than why can’t Microsoft? “The fact that things have been pretty dynamic means that they’re probably still pretty dynamic,” he said.
We’ll see, although there seems to be a little bit of confusion about the launch event next week. Yesterday, a handful of media reports claimed that the event was being held in conjunction with T-Mobile USA, but clearly based on the invitations sent out today, AT&T’s de la Vega was going to be present. AllThingsD has a screenshot of the original event listing the presence of “T-Mobile reps” here.
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