iPhone News Updated

AutoCAD Returns To Mac Microsoft faces heavy costs to make WinPhone 7 competitive with iPhone

AutoCAD Returns To Mac Microsoft faces heavy costs to make WinPhone 7 competitive with iPhone

Windows Phone 7 is expected to cost Microsoft (NASDAQ: MSFT) almost a half-billion dollars in marketing expenses when the phone is first rolled out, according Jonathan Goldberg, analyst with Deutsche Bank.

In an interview with TechCrunch, Goldberg said he estimated Microsoft’s marketing costs for the Windows Phone 7 platform to run around $400 million when the first Windows Phone devices roll out later this year. That figure is in addition to the substantial amount of money it has already invested in developing the new platform.

“This is make-or-break for them. They need to do whatever it takes to stay in the game,” Goldberg said. “They don’t have to take share from Android or Apple (NASDAQ: AAPL), so long as they can attract enough consumers switching from feature phones.”

Microsoft has spent a significant amount of time courting developers to build for the Windows Phone platform, recently rolling out a new series of online tutorials demonstrating best practices for application building. Microsoft is also willing to pay iPhone developers to port their programs onto Windows Phone 7. Developers’ involvement is a key piece in the platform’s success. Microsoft senior product manager Anand Iyer told TechCrunch that the software company has already seen 300,000 downloads of Microsoft’s development tools.

Goldberg said Microsoft executives told him that Microsoft, along with its carrier and manufacturing partners, would likely spend “billions” of dollars in the first year for marketing and development.

Out of the eight handset manufacturers Microsoft announced in February as supporting its new platform, it appears three are left: HTC, Samsung and LG, Goldberg said. (The others were Dell, HP (NYSE: HPQ), Sony-Ericsson, Garmin-Asus and Toshiba).

[Thanks: http://www.fiercemobileit.com]

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