On the 1st of February 2012, I’ll be down in London attending Monk Gras, the first conference I’ve ever paid for myself.

Organised by the RedMonk analyst firm, the conference has some really good attendees and speakers listed, like Jason Hoffman from Joyent (those people who do SmartOS and Node, and cloud stuff), Dave McRory, architect of VMware Cloud Foundry, and is billed as:

“exploring how technology is changing the way we socialise and how the way we socialise is influencing the way we build and use technology.”

For £99, I’m not sure you could get a better value day of learning, I’m really excited to be going and hope to see lots of you there.

p.s. Did I mention the craft beer tasting sessions…?

The news has come out today that HTC’s mobile phone sales have fallen 20% compared last year, and profits are way down too. On the face of it, this is really odd given that the smartphone market is still growing at a massive rate, HTC are a significant player in that market, and don’t produce any non-smart “feature” phones.

HTC have also gone down the sensible route of simplifying their product line up – they still sell lots of varieties of phones, but if you visit the HTC UK website, you see just 5 phones – the Sensation, Sensation XL, Sensation XE, and Titan (their new Windows Phone 7 device), and Rhyme.

So why are HTC sales down so much?

Personally, I think it’s a pretty simple one – fashion.

No one can dispute that the iPhone sets the trends in mobile phones, and even Samsung might admit that they looked at a couple of iPhone 4’s before the Galaxy S2 was launched, but HTC have stuck to their rounded plastic look. That rounded look reminds people of the iPhone 3G, launched back in 2008, and frankly it looks old now compared to the iPhone 4S.

In a world where your phone is as much a part of your image as your watch or clothes, looking like a 2008 Apple product in 2012 is simply not going to work, however cool your headphones are.

Get a group of geeks together right now, and the topic of conversation is sure to turn to the reasons why Windows Phone 7 is failing, with opinions ranging from “It’s too late”, to “The Microsoft Windows brand is too damaged”, to “The carriers and manufacturers love to customise their Android phones, but can’t with WP7”.

But I wonder if Windows Phone really is failing? Sure, the sales figures are pretty poor, and the Microsoft brand is rubbish outside of “Enterprise” organisations these days, and almost every Android phone is customised in some way before sale, but are they reasons for failure?

Sales Figures

This is perhaps the hardest argument to defeat, as the sales figures are bad, but I’m getting a lot more non-technical people asking me about WP7 than I did 3 or 4 months ago, and they aren’t asking “Why is it failing?”. The marketing message is taking time, but I think it is getting through. If Microsoft and Nokia keep spending, they will make a dent.

Branding

It really doesn’t matter whether the Microsoft brand is awful or not, you barely see it on the Nokia Lumia 800 phone, or on the Samsung WP7 devices, or on any other manufacturer. It’s the manufacturer who’s brand is being relied on to sell the device. If Microsoft does buy Nokia as many have speculated, I strongly believe they will retain the Nokia brand for all the mobile devices they sell.

 Customisation

The manufacturers and carriers like customising their phones, but do their customers like paying for the customisations? I don’t believe so. I don’t think TouchWiz, MotoBlur, HTC Sense, or any pre-installed unremovable apps are worth a penny to most mobile phone users, and they’re unhappy putting up with the delays and problems that they customisations cause.

The Future

I suppose the real question about WP7 isn’t “Is it failing?”, but “Will it fail?”, and that comes down to just how much money Microsoft are willing to pay to remain relevant to mobile computing.

For the answer to that, you can look at XBox ($4 billion lost in the first 4 years), Bing, and Internet Explorer, and I think the answer is “An awful lot”. Now that they have decided mobile is a strategic target, Microsoft are going to spend billions of dollars, and keep spending them year after year.

If they can outspend Google and Apple on software and hardware development, then they can succeed where RIM and Nokia themselves failed, in building a sustainable mobile platform that can compete with (and maybe beat) Apple and Google.