Microsoft's curious lack of ambition in mobile
Microsoft says "There's plenty of innovation in the pipeline" for Windows Mobile. For those of us who haven't considered a Windows-based phone since the iPAQ's decline, the real question is, "If Microsoft has an innovative Windows Mobile experience, why is the company keeping it such a secret?"
As Mark Sigal highlights, Google is approaching mobile with an open approach; Apple is winning with a closed approach; and Microsoft? Well, Microsoft seems to still think the phone is a PDA, with little innovation (closed or open) that would trouble a consumer to bother buying a Windows-powered mobile device.
Perhaps that is why Microsoft's smartphone market share has now dipped below 10 percent and shows no sign of resurrection.
This isn't about open source versus proprietary software. It's about focus, something that Microsoft seems not to have given mobile in a long, long time. Steve Ballmer was willing to spend roughly $45 billion on Yahoo to compete in search, but has managed only a $500 million acquisition of Danger to compete in mobile.
This despite advertising, computing, and (of course) communications moving to mobile devices. What has Microsoft been thinking? Or not thinking, as the case may be?
Yes, Microsoft is now partnering with Nokia to up its mobile game, but ZDNet's Larry Dignan is spot on calling this a "dog of a deal born from weakness," not strength.
What Microsoft needs is to innovate. Or at least to copy someone else's innovations. But it appears to be doing neither. This is inexcusable for a company with its resources and development talent. Microsoft is a great company, one that occasionally turns an industry on its head, as it has with SharePoint to the stodgy Enterprise Content Management market.
But Windows Mobile? It's lame.
This isn't a demand that Microsoft miraculously achieve mobile perfection. Heck, the iPhone has taught us that, great as it is, "good enough" is more than good enough (e.g., it comes with an underpowered camera...that everyone seems to use).
Microsoft is fond of talking about just how much it spends on research and development. But it's time to stop talking and start shipping. I've heard rumors of an exceptional mobile product on the way from Microsoft, but that's all I ever hear: something "in the cooker" that will "rock the world soon!"
As Morrissey used to croon for The Smiths, "How soon is now?"
Follow me on Twitter @mjasay.
Matt Asay brings a decade of in-the-trenches open-source business and legal experience to The Open Road, with an emphasis on emerging open-source business strategies and opportunities. Matt is vice president of business development at Alfresco, a company that develops open-source software for content management. He is a member of the CNET Blog Network and is not an employee of CNET. Disclosure. You can follow Matt on Twitter @mjasay. 
whether or not people buy them is a different story, one about the fact that microsoft failed on the first attempt, got into the game too late after apple already dominates the market, and hasn't had any real good advertisements for the zune, plus no one really thinks microsoft can make a good product right now
unfortunately i think they're probably going to wait too long to really try to do well in mobile and they will put out a good product eventually but it will suffer the same fate as the zune
i have a winmo phone. its not for the every day consumer and thats the problem. its for tech geeks that like to control how the phone works. i quit using stock oses on the phone a long time ago and i have a hole lot more functionality than you cute little explosive device
It did, eventually, manage to kill the Palm Pilot because of the allegiance of the corporate IT drones to anything Microsoft. (Keeping Microsoft products running created plenty of IT jobs.)
But Windows Mobile is a boring, poor user experience, product. I've never met anyone who was excited by it.
Perhaps Microsoft sees too much competition -- iPhone, Palm Pre, Android -- to want to bother. Maybe the lack of sunshine in Redmond has finally caused such massive depression that no one cares anymore.
Seriously, I don't think that Microsoft will stay out of this market for long. Eventually it will find a way to co-opt what others have done, turn it into a Microsoft product, and reenter the market, all the while proclaiming that it has developed something new, innovative, and revolutionary.
Here's what I suspect: MS might actually have realized / taken inventory of all the work they need to do in mobile. From reworking their UI paradigms, to improving how they update phones, to giving carriers less control of the experience, etc. etc. -- and fixing everything is a long-term thing. They probably know that they are going to continue to lose ground while they turn things around.
Here's the other thing nobody seems to realize. The smartphone market hasn't matured yet. Not even close. Smartphones have been around for just about 10 years and have been mainstream since less than 4 years. This sector is going to probably see a couple of *decades* of double digit growth (probably until there are around 2 billion+ smartphones in the world). In addition to that, people will continue to replace phones on an average once every year or every two years (unlike PCs that get replaced at a much lower frequency). Even 2 decades from now when the market (may have) matured and growth slows down to single digits or becomes flat, it'll still be a hugmongous market, and every % point of market share will be worth scrapping over.
The bottom line -- there's no ridiculous hurry to come out with a response, if it isn't the right one. It's worth taking the time to make sure you get it right. I suspect that this is how MS is approaching mobile.
Of course, that's a lot of conjecture. I could be full of horse-manure :)
...a warmed-over IE6?
Bleah.
Random_Walk, use your brain and read the rest of the comment.
Jive Turkey, Nokia is engaged in the manufacturing of mobile devices not the OS software. If you are not familiar with the technology then you shouldn't reply.
We switched over to Windows Mobile-based devices about 2 years ago. I point them at our Exchange server, and largely never hear from the users again. They can pick from a wide range of devices based on their particular preferences: touchscreen, full qwerty, flip-phone, etc. If we switched to IPhones, they get a choice of exactly 1, which comes with a $20 per user additional charge per user, per month, over what I pay to equip them with a Windows Mobile device. Sure, there aren't as many "apps", but most of what I've seen in the apps is stuff that's not really business related.
WinMo + Exchange is a great TCO advantage over anything else on the market.
You're both right and wrong. I just attended a webinar about two weeks ago where Christopher Grady, the CEO of IceWarp was announcing their latest release of their unified communications server and he said in the Q&A session that the primary reason for including Exchange ActiveSync into their product was because it had become the de facto standard for mobile synchronization, spoke highly of it technically, and said it was the used to synch not only Windows Mobile devices but also the iPhone and Blackberry and other products and services.
I'm not so sure Microsoft isn't winning the bigger was by selling the back end technology to almost everyone you mention in your article.
Jerry D.
Sorry, he specifically mentioned Blackberry EAS support via plugin. I should have mentioned that.
www.icewarp.com/training/Version_10_Overview
G'day,
Jerry
The mobile OS however is completely lame compared to the iPhone. You can run multiple applications simultaneously, but it's clunky to use and hasn't really changed since the late 1990's. Get with it Microsoft, you've been chanting about mobile devices for ages and you've made dot.net development for mobile absurdly easy. Time to put some glitz into the OS and bring this sector of your business back online.
Look at the Palm Pre and WebOS for example.
None of these words apply to Microsoft. They have made lots of money on subpar products. A phone is the ultimate consumer device which means that they would actually have to talk to real people who don't want the device to crash. Their way of creating quality has been to ship garbage and wait for other people to find the flaws in their products. Now it is catching up with them. In the future, mobile devices will be used more than computers. IT people will have to get over themselves and quit trying to jam a lousy Microsoft products down to workers, so that they can remain all powerful and all knowing.
Microsoft is the GM of the computer world. Big, duimb, slow, and with products that no one cares about or needs anymore.
Same with Apple haters.
Microsoft will come back guns blazing though.
MSFT has roughly tracked the S&P 500 over the past five years.
They sure make nice keyboards though.
I'm going to keep an eye on Microsoft because they have been suprising this year. First off, Bing. By any objective standard Bing has been successful for Microsoft. It's caused Google to take notice and actually change. Second is the upcoming new Zune. Lots of independent reviews out there regarding it, nearly all of it very positive. Third, Windows 7. Windows XP didn't even get this much positive buzz. I've been using it and the buzz is well deserved.
What's different? Bill Gates has left the building. No way things stayed the same once he left. It's not possible. I think with Bill out of the way things are loosening up. Pure speculation on my part.
A bajillion dollars and not a single original idea. Sad.
Microsoft has been on the fast track to irrelevance for a long time. They just haven't realized it yet.
That would be like blaming your car manufacturer because the idiot that built your house didn't build a garage wide enough to fit it in.
Yes, it is most definitely Microsoft's fault. Windows Mobile has a hardware limitation where it can only use resistive touch screens. We will have to wait until version 7 comes out late next year until Windows Mobile can use the much more responsive capacitive touch screens found on modern smartphones (iPhone, Palm Pre, Blackberry Storm, T-Mobile G1). As for the stylus issue, all their on-screen buttons and drop down menus were tiny. Definitely not finger friendly. Nowadays, some third party companies, like HTC, design their own software interface on top of Windows Mobile to give an acceptable touch experience.
- by artistjoh August 20, 2009 11:38 PM PDT
- I'll leave the WinMo to others but pull Matt Asay on his cflip rejection of the iPhone camera as mediocre and the only reason people use it because it is good enough and always on you. Huh? if that were the case then the world would be awash in photographs taken on 3 to 8 MP camera phones from other manufacturers which it is clearly not (well, not like iPhone photos and videos have captured attention anyway).
- Like this Reply to this comment
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Showing 1 of 2 pages (50 Comments)iPhone photographers have instead discovered that the quality of a camera is not measured by its megapixels so much as the creativity and qulity of its software and while the basic camera shipped in the iPhone has basic features apps in the App Store provide a legion of great features that make the iPhone camera truly outstanding.
As just one example Panorama is as the name suggests an app for taking panoramas. It actually has a wider range of panoramic functions than in any prosumer digital I have ever owned with high MP counts. The stitching software is better than anything Sony Cybershot has ever come up with and panoramas can be made from landscape orientation or portrait orientation and in portrait the resulting image is around 5MP in size. This app probably does such a good job on panoramic photography because it is entirely dedicated to that function while the panoramic function on a 10 or 12 MP prosumer digital camera is in a menu with numerous other functions and each individual function is competing with other functions in the menu and the more complex each becomes the more difficult the menu and ease of use becomes while in a dedicated app more functions for the individual function can be built in while its own menu system remains simple.
Same applies to using black and white and numerous other features, and the beauty of the App Store is that you get as many or as few of the camera features as you want. Over all the use of apps makes the iPhone camera the best small digital I have ever owned despite the low MP count.
Another thing that should be mentioned is the spot focus and exposure adjustment that occurs in the iPhone camera just by touching the place you want to focus on or adjust exposure levels for. It is brilliant in use. It is also unique to the iPhone (until camera equipped iPods come out I suppose) but is a big contributor to the popularity of the iPone camera for users. The iPhone recently overtook Canon as the most used camera by uploaders of photos on Flickr.
Nokia is the worlds largest manufacturer of camera phones. Nokia advertises their 5MP and Ziess lens and flash in their high end models and the rest are still "good enough". There have to be an awful lot of Nokia camera phones in pockets and purses everywhere and yet they don't beat the iPhone in Flickr uploads. Why do you think that is? Think maybe it is about the quality of the software?
If Microsoft understood that simple fact they wouldn't be in the difficult position they are in now. Unfortunately for them by not controlling the hardware their software goes into it is hard for them to optimize the software to get the most out of the hardware. Apple doesn't have that problem.