Microsoft to offer Windows for free on phones, tablets

Corporate News

A Dell Pro 8 Windows Tablet with a stylus. Microsoft is to give away its Windows operating system to makers of smartphones and small tablets for consumers. Photo/FILE 

By Reuters

In Summary

• Windows will be free for companies making phones and tablets with screen sizes under nine inches for the consumer market. A license fee will still apply for business devices.

Microsoft is to give away its Windows operating system to makers of smartphones and small tablets for consumers as it seeks to make more of an impact on those fast-growing markets and counter the massive success of Google's free Android platform.

Microsoft's move, announced at its annual developers conference in San Francisco, is an attempt to broaden the small user base of mobile versions of Windows, in the hope that more customers will end up using Microsoft's money-making, cloud-based services such as Skype and Office.

Up to now, Microsoft has charged phone and tablet makers between $5 and $15 per device to use its Windows system, as it has done successfully at higher prices for many years with Windows on personal computers. Hardware makers factor the cost of that into the sale price of each device.

That model has been obliterated in the past few years by the fast adoption of Google's Android system for phones and tablets, which hardware makers quickly embraced and now accounts for more than 75 per cent of all smartphones sold last year. Apple's iPhone and iPad account for most of the rest of the mobile computing market.

By contrast, Windows-powered phones held only three per cent of the global smartphone market last year. Windows tablets have only about two per cent of the tablet market, according to tech research firm Gartner.

Microsoft's move to make Windows free for some consumer devices bucks a central tenet of Bill Gates' original philosophy, that software should be paid for, which led to Microsoft's massive financial success over the last four decades. But analysts said it is a realistic reaction to the runaway success of free Android.

"Microsoft is facing challenges on the mobile and tablet fronts and need to change their strategy to move the growth needle, this is a good and logical first step," said Daniel Ives, an analyst at FBR Capital Markets.

Windows will be free for companies making phones and tablets with screen sizes under nine inches for the consumer market. A license fee will still apply for business devices.