Microsoft has some gull. After about ten years in the mobile PDA and mobile phone space, replacing the Palm OS on most of Palms smart phones until Web OS was released; and BlackBerry being Microsoft's only competition (I realize there is Symbian from Nokia but let's be real it was basally these 2 controlled the smart phone market). Until the iPhone showed up and changed the smart phone market forever, Microsoft stagnated the development of the Windows Mobile OS. Microsoft had a rare opportunity to control the mobile market but did not seem to understand that a mobile phone is not a desktop computer. Windows Mobile is slow and bulky, and difficult to use. Lots of Palm users would buy old phones just to run Palm OS because they didn't like Windows Mobile. Now Microsoft is to release Windows 7 Mobile, I for one was very excited for this release but not anymore. Microsoft some how thinks it has a healthy share of the smart phone market. Paul Thurrott from the Windows Supersite stated that Microsoft controls about 18% of the smart phone market on the Windows Weekly podcast with Leo Laporte. This is down from the 24% it had back in 2004 according to wikipedia with most of the manufactures and developers abandoning the Windows Mobile platform for more current standardized platforms like the iPhone, Android, Symbian and Yes Web OS. The one thing these Mobile operating systems have in common is web standards. Internet Explorer does not support web standards very well at all and from a consumer perspective why would you want a platform what has very few apps and at the time of this blog post you don't even know how many older apps will be ported or able to be ported to Windows 7 mobile.
Granted for the corporate space depending on the difficulty with IT support will either be Windows 7 mobile or BlackBerry (probably the latter), but the more work starts to encroach our personal time there will be a huge demand for these nicer easier to use products. Most IT support and network professionals know what I'm talking about. Microsoft will have to start changing it's attitude if it wants to grab a bigger share of the mobile market.
- licensing it to mobile manufactures for free
- creating an app store experience similar to that of the apple store
- A web browser that supports web standards better
- Maybe a mobile Microsoft office apps for windows 7 mobile
- Maintaining or improving the syncing and integration with exchange
There is a huge push right now to keep everything on the cloud and an economic incentive for lots of companies to move their businesses to cloud services like Google docs, even Microsoft is going to release a version of office 2010 for the cloud. I like Windows 7 and like what I see with Windows 7 mobile but with Android, iPhone, and the other mobile OS, out there that I can develop for just using web standards, I don't know why I would want to develop for Windows Mobile when I would have to redo a lot of my code even to get things to work in Internet Explorer properly. Microsoft has a major up hill battle ahead of it's self in the mobile space, and they are taking the old Microsoft way of handling it. With the mobile OS user base increasing and Microsoft's share shrinking they might want to rethink the way they are approaching this.
