Microsoft still has no iPhone answer
Most of Microsoft's announcements Monday at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona were leaked weeks ago, so there weren't any big surprises.
Now where the heck's the Zune icon on this thing?
(Credit: Microsoft)There's a new mobile OS, Windows Mobile 6.5, that's supposed to be friendlier than the notoriously clunky earlier versions. (ZDNet's mobile maven Matthew Miller is still disappointed.)
There's a set of cloud-based services for synchronizing data like contacts and photos. (Although apparently v.1 will not be connected with the Windows Live or Live Mesh platforms or services, so the vision of unified data sync across devices is still a whiteboard drawing as far as Microsoft products and services are concerned.)
There's a marketplace for Windows Mobile apps. There's a brand change--the phones will be called "Windows Phones," although the OS is still "Windows Mobile." (Confused?) Oh, and the company has finally acknowledged that competing in the consumer space is important, a year and a half after CEO Steve Ballmer dismissed the iPhone as a "$500 subsidized item" that had "no chance" of gaining any significant market share.
Assuming that any of this makes you want to run out and buy a Windows Mobile phone, too bad. None of it's available until late this year.
I'll give Microsoft some credit for envisioning and beginning to build a free alternative to Apple's MobileMe service. And the mobile marketplace is a no-brainer. But Monday's announcements just underscore that Microsoft has no answer to the iPhone.
There was no entertainment component to the announcements. No port of the Zune client software or marketplace to the phone. No online storage service for music. No mention of where the Danger acquisition went or what former Mac Business Unit head Roz Ho's working on.
Microsoft's mobile head, Andy Lees, did promise that the company's going to make some other exciting announcements over the next 12 to 18 months, so I guess crawl, walk, run is the strategy. But Microsoft has sure been crawling for a long time. And the list of toddlers is growing, with Google's Android continuing to draw attention, Nokia continuing to update its Ovi services, and even Palm coming back from the dead. Not to mention well-regarded competitors like Apple and RIM.
This isn't a monopoly or a slow-moving market with very high barriers to entry like console gaming. This is a highly competitive space where turnover is incredibly quick, innovation will win, and laggards will die. For Microsoft's sake, I hope they've got a lot more mobile news in the pipeline.
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Matt Rosoff is an analyst with Directions on Microsoft, where he covers Microsoft's consumer products and corporate news. He's written about the technology industry since 1995, and reviewed the first Rio MP3 player for CNET.com in 1998. He is a member of the CNET Blog Network. Disclosure. You can follow Matt on Twitter @mattrosoff. 
1) Android
2) iPhone (maybe reverse 1 & 2)
3) Symbian
4) Blackberry
5 ) Windows mobile
The iPhone is a one trick pony that's already becoming last year's phone and Android is just a curio.
That alone tells you that he's troll and apple fanboy... not to mention a bit of an idiot. If he had used a Windows computer anytime this decade, he would realize that as already pointed out, that Task Manager icon is completely Windows.
You just have to love that level of epic failure on his behalf ;)
ibeetle, the order for future smartphones will be more like: RIM, iPhone, Symbian, Android, Palm.
I know everyone is mostly talking about consumer devices here.
But lets not forget the corporate or manufacturing sector. What choice do we have there: propriety platforms or Windows Mobile? Windows Mobile is much easier from a developer point of view.
In that case he'd still be wrong: Android and OpenMoko, as well as Symbian itself (as of recent times) are all open source entirely.
and mostly "TOTAL LACK OF IMAGINATION" is Microsoft at this point. Thats not to say its quite possible that there are plenty of very imaginative people at Microsoft, but by the time that big rock gets rolling..... the market is gone or changed significantly, then guess what.....back to the drawing board!
Only my 2 cents.
Microsoft's OS market share is falling.
Microsoft's Smartphone market share is falling.
Yep, as a previous poster said, Microsoft has simply grown too big to innovate. Let's hope that doesn't happen to Apple and Google.
It's no suprise that Microsoft is losing market share, since it was almost all the market. I think this is less Microsoft falling and more everyone else rising.
The *only* thing Windows Mobile does well and better than anything else is Exchange/Outlook synchronization, and that's because Microsoft makes both products. Beyond that, I'm ready to jump to iPhones this fall for my company; I'm the IT director, and we're currently standardized on Windows Mobile.
Poor Microsoft, sometimes it seems like they don't have an innovative bone in their body. This recent news about Windows Mobile 6.5 shows that they are just applying bandaids to a very diseased and dying patient, and even then nothing will be available until late 2009 after new developments with iPhone and webOS have occurred.
The core of Windows Mobile is an antiquated operating system that can't compete with something like iPhone, Android, and webOS, which were created from the ground up to support finger touch and other modern smartphone features. Windows Mobile, if it is to have any chance of success, needs to be completely rewritten; Microsoft needs to accept the fate that Palm did for its old Palm OS: death. And I seriously doubt Microsoft has the guts to do this.
In the meantime, a steady stream of useless announcements is all that we will see. Steve Ballmer is the King of NULL.
Perhaps it's the users that have ruined Microsoft.
While the underpinnings of the OS may be good. The GUI and every app written on it needs to be re-written.
Windows Mobile 7 will have to be an order of magnatude better than 6.5 because by the time they get this out their only advantage (business apps and integration) will long be overtaken by other phone OS's.
They really need to dump the folks running the WinMo team and get some fresh blood in there. Drop the desktop metaphor, get finger freindly, hook to the cloud, and do things that people expect out a modern phone these days.
WinMo is quickly turning into the hobbiest's phone (kinda like Linux is on the desktop).
If WinMo were anything like Linux, it wouldn't be dying.
It was a statement, not a cheap shot. And it's true; Linux is used by those who are willing to give the time and effort required to learn to use it comfortably, and it also is much more interesting to learn than Windows.
I think the point was pretty blatantly clear. Apple is targeting consumers and Microsoft is targeting busienss users. There is no good or bad to this.
Myles Taylor:
The iPhone / Touch is not suitable for the Enterprise marketplace. The email application is very lacking with no ability to keep separate address books, look at offline mail folders, browse folders within the inbox while offline, etc. These are basic abilities that even Palm can do. Unfortunately Apple will not allow anyone else to produce a mail client and the included one is not much better than rubbing two sticks together.
Here's a good example: I have both my Google email and work account connected. My Google address book was only around 50 entries. The moment I synched to the Exchange service, the Apple device downloaded the entire address book of more than 35,000 entries. I don't have a choice in the matter- you can't make those sorts of changes in their mail app or settings. It's all or nothing. Now my original contacts are hopelessly lost in that flood. That lone has rendered the address book useless to me.
There's a lot of silly things like that which make it clear that the device is not ready for the business market at this time. They've had nearly two years now and it's just not ready.
Microsoft: The Freedom to Innovate (TM). LOL!!!
Somebody please put this technological dinosaur out of its misery so we can focus our dollars on truly innovative companies. MS has become a joke of the highest order.
I don't know... perhaps CNET is guilty of doing something silly like.... reproting the news?
Winmo7 will need to be more than just a catch up mobile OS in order to make a dent in the market as it is and, if WinMo6.5 is any indication, 7 won't be more than just that, a catch up OS.
Zunes have already failed on a massive scale. They aren't cross platform compatible like the iPhone is and the "services" offered are crap to anyone who knows about Last.fm or other free, legal alternatives. On top of that, having them lock up on such a large scale and giving such bad press is never a good thing.
Microsoft will have to do more than just bring things out on time in order to get back to normal. Microsoft will have to change dramatically.
And when Windows 7 comes out no-one will care about OS X or Linux because even if we accept that Vista is a failure as you silly fanboys like to trumpet OS X has managed to increase its global market share by a mere 2% and Linus doesn't even register.
No-one cares. Deal with it.
"This isn't a monopoly or a slow-moving market with very high barriers to entry like console gaming. This is a highly competitive space where turnover is incredibly quick, innovation will win, and laggards will die."
This is one of the most insightful things I've read regarding Microsoft and mobile. Microsoft is simply not a nimble company that can compete in such a space. Their core competencies and software/product development processes are geared towards markets where new versions of products appear every few years (like Windows, Office, and Xbox). They're simply not fit to compete in mobile. It's a complete mismatch between market requirements and corporate culture.
Ballmer must go, plain and simple.
- by atish505 February 16, 2009 8:18 PM PST
- Windows Mobile is dead, It trails all OSes in fourth quarter of 2008 (and for full 208) except for Palm. It is a joke. The sooner they realize and break out of the 'Emperor's new clothes', delusions the better for them.
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- by DrtyDogg February 17, 2009 3:47 AM PST
- Actually it was Q3 that Apple bested Windows Mobile. And as far as full "208". Here is a quote from the report that you are mis-quoting:
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- by seven7dust February 17, 2009 4:48 AM PST
- The Iphone was introduced just 2 years back, people seem to be forgetting that !
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Showing 1 of 2 pages (64 Comments)They had huge opportunity, to fill in the market space left open by the failure of iPhone, and very limited success fo BlackBerry in both China and in India (the world's largest and second largest mobile markets). However they chose to drop the ball and Nokia and Sony Ericcson took away the Lion;s share of the market with Symbian based smart phones.
Despite being overtaken by Apple globally in Q3, Microsoft has increased its share of the smart phone market year-on-year, helped by the volumes being achieved by vendors like HTC and Samsung in particular
http://www.canalys.com/pr/2008/r2008112.htm
it can't take over the entire world in that small a timeframe
Give it time, maybe the next iteration will do better in unsubsidized markets like India !
but ya Nokia is the king worldwide !
the problem for Microsoft all round is that they need to take market-share away from the Competition
by wooing the customers, something they r not very good at to say the least !