The 2013 Mobile World Congress is billed as the world's largest gathering of mobile device manufacturers, but conspicuously missing from this year's event are three huge players: Apple, Google and Microsoft.
Apple always chooses to hold its own events, and Google's Android operating system is popular enough that it doesn't need to be at the expo, but Microsoft? Its Windows Phones hold less than 3 percent of the global smartphone market; doesn't it need the exposure?
Nokia has already made some noise by announcing budget-friendly Lumia Windows Phones, but Microsoft is choosing to stay quiet. According to PC Mag, it's because the Redmond giant has a new motto: "shut up and ship."
At this point, Windows 8-based phones are merely a few months old, and Microsoft doesn't see the point in hyping a new OS when the current line-up just launched.
"We're not going to do this thing where we announce the next version [of Windows Phone] months and months before it's available," said Greg Sullivan, a marketing executive at Microsoft, to PC Mag. "Over the course of the next several months, I wouldn't be surprised to see some exciting new devices and more interoperability before we start talking about what [operating system] is next."
Whenever Microsoft does get around to unveiling its next OS (currently codenamed "Windows Phone Blue"), the company isn't going to leave Windows 8 users in the dust as it did with Windows 7.
"We're going to have an upgrade path going forward," said Sullivan. Windows Phone 8 users will be able to upgrade to Windows Blue because of its flexible hardware, even if they're using the lower-end Windows Phones revealed at MWC.
Pointing to Microsoft's expanding ecosystem, Sullivan said it gives the company a distinct advantage over both Firefox OS and Android when it comes to serving users constrained by budgets and fragmentation.
"You don't make sacrifices on a Windows Phone. If you have an Android phone that's affordable, you don't have the latest software, you can't run a large percentage of the apps and performance is not awesome."
