Opinion: Wileyfox is a vulture circling the corpse of Windows Phone’s enterprise market

We knew of Wileyfox’s Windows Phone plans in April already, and then wondered if it will support Continuum for Phones.

The device was unveiled at IFA yesterday and revealed to be running a Snapdragon 210 processor, making that idea rather unlikely.

In fact, besides running Windows Phone, the main stand-out feature of the handset, at 249 euro, is its extremely poor value for money.

WindowsArea.de spoke to Wileyfox trying to find out who exactly they expect to be buying the handset.

There a manager confirmed they would be taking advantage of companies basically stranded on Windows Phone by Microsoft’s withdrawal from the market, saying:

According to Wileyfox, there are still a lot of companies that rely on Windows Phone or Windows 10 Mobile and who need a well supported alternative in the medium term. 

Either to bridging up from Microsoft something new comes or simply to delay the radical change of the platform and the ecosystem longer, because not all companies then have the budget for iPhones, if Microsoft no longer provides new smartphones.

In short the company will be delivering a handset which likely costs less than $50 to produce at 5 times the price for companies who have no choice to buy, since Nokia, Microsoft and every other company exited the market.

It appears the strategy was a good one, with Wileyfox saying they had “commitments from at least three major customers in the UK. This also includes the Vodafone Group, which will have the devices in use internally.”

At one point Microsoft had more than 20% market share in the enterprise market in Europe, and I imagine there are thousands of companies who can simply not afford to jump to a new platform yet.  We do suspect when they do however, they are rather unlikely to ever come back to a Microsoft mobile OS.