Verizon sells millions of iPhones. Microsoft wastes millions on Windows Phone marketing.

Can this possibly be true? Microsoft will drop $200 million in marketing and sales incentives for Windows Phone. In 2012. In the United States:

In this most crucial of markets, Microsoft has one goal and one goal only: Convince consumers to purchase millions of Windows Phone handsets in the first half of 2012. Doing so will require a new set of phones—as I exclusively detailed previously in Microsoft's LTE Plans for Windows Phone—as well as stepping up engagement with tech enthusiasts, increasing retail-worker recommendation rates through training ands sales incentives, and other means.

According to the internal Microsoft documentation I've viewed, the total cost of this marketing tsunami is in the neighborhood of $200 million, not $100 million. And again, that's just for the United States. And on AT&T at least, Nokia is outspending Microsoft 2-to-1.

Included in the plan are sales incentives for retail workers, aimed at getting them to finally start recommending Windows Phone as an alternative to Android and iPhone. The amount of payments are $10 to $15 per handset sold, depending on the number sold, for some handset models.

Consider the following:

Verizon Wireless, the largest U.S. mobile carrier, sold 4.2 million Apple Inc. (AAPL) iPhones in the fourth quarter, more than doubling from the third quarter, said Fran Shammo, finance chief of the company’s parent.

The iPhone sales will narrow gross margins at the wireless business by 500 to 600 basis points, Shammo, chief financial officer of Verizon Communications Inc. (VZ), said today at a Citigroup Inc. event in San Francisco. U.S. carriers sell smartphones such as the iPhone to subscribers at a loss to get them to sign up for contracts that typically run for two years.

The demand suggests Verizon Wireless is winning an increasing share of new iPhone users, after gaining rights to offer the handset to its subscribers last year. In the third quarter, Verizon added 2 million customers for the device, trailing the 2.7 million iPhone activations at AT&T Inc. (T), which has offered the handset since 2007.

In this recent quarter. Verizon sold 4.2 million iPhones. Just Verizon. One quarter.

Dear Steve Ballmer, I bet you don't sell 4.2 million Windows Phones in the US in all of 2012.

Care to take me up on this?

Forget the $200 million marketing. Forget the sales incentives. You are in charge of Microsoft and yet somehow missed the *largest personal computing market* ever: the smartphone.

I have doubts you can ever catch up. But, I will tell you that the Windows Phone, as presently conceived, will continue to underperform even Blackberry.

You allowed iPhone and Android to own the market. To establish robust, virtuous, global ecosystems. And allowed the planet time to embrace the app as the mode of accessing the full range of what the mobile web has to offer and the app to leverage the full power of the smartphone while insisting upon a Windows Phone OS that repeatedly tells people it is not an app phone.

Tiles vs apps? Really?

That will never work.

For al that Microsoft has and for all that Microsoft can do, as we enter 2012, Microsoft has yet to establish a *single* reason why a smartphone user should choose Windows Phone. $200 million in marketing will not change this reality.