Via @TheTechEye

Rumours that Microsoft and Nokia are set to spend over $100 million on marketing Windows 8 tablets and smartphones are rubbish, according to veteran vole-watcher Paul Thurrott, who claims that they are going to spend a lot more.

Thurrott said that he has been given the real marketing figure and it is a lot more than “in the neighborhood of $100 million.”

Thurrott said it’s going to require shedloads of money to convince punters to buy millions of Windows Phone handsets in the first half of 2012. Not only will it need a new set of phones, it will also require increased contact with tech enthusiasts, increasing retail-worker recommendation rates through training and sales incentives, and other methods.

[…]

The Windows phones will have to stand on their merits.

You can ignore the marketing figures because you cannot market an electronic device into existence and expect that it will stick. If it isn’t perceived to be good enough then the initial flood of devices will end up on Ebay and the grey market will kill the economics of incentivised sales, which is almost exactly what happened to Sun when the .COM boom collapsed, taking high-end sales away in favour of good-enough secondhand hardware.

Similarly here: people will buy, try and pass it on if they don’t like it, and MS will be left trying to undercut Ebay. It’s a loss-making proposition, not a loss-leader.

Think “HP Touchpad” but with much lower margins.

So is the Windows Mobile good enough to make people love it the way that people love iPhone? That’s the real question for Nokisoft…