Bad News for HTC Means Bad News for Microsoft

Bad numbers from HTC last week:

Taiwan smartphone maker HTC on Monday posted a 30 percent dip in its first-quarter earnings, as the economic crisis sapped demand for the company’s feature-jammed mobile phones.

That’s bad news for Microsoft, if you recall this bit we learned in February:

At Microsoft’s press conference yesterday at Mobile World Congress, if you tied two threads together, you learned a very interesting fact about HTC, one of the company’s closest handset makers — the Taiwanese company is responsible for 80 percent of Windows Mobile phone sales.

I’m sure Microsoft can fix this with a few commercials about the high “Apple tax” that applies to iPhones, though.

★ Monday, 13 April 2009