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Microsoft Enters the Cell Phone OS Market
PuZZLeR writes: "Today, Microsoft unveiled a new operating system for mobile phones (named 'Windows Powered Smartphone 2002') and plans to fully enter the wireless data devices with voice capabilities by utilizing both cellphones and PDA devices. TI already created a reference design for the Ms powered phone. While this sounds like Microsoft is going after Handspring, RIM or Danger, cellphone OS manufactures, like Nokia and OpenWave are expected to counteract to the announcements. Today, Nokia announced it will offer mobile phone makers its own development kit and OS."
Man that is going to suck when your trapped out in the wilderness, flat tire, and no food.
Where is the hotswap redundant PHONE?!!!
Neck_of_the_Woods
#/usr/local/surf/glassy/overhead
Let's remember the words of Mr. Burke:
"The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing." -Edmund Burke
Go buy someone OTHER than Microsoft's phone, please!
--Grrae
"I may not have gone where I intended to go, but I think I have ended up where I intended to be." -Douglas Adams
I mean, honestly, for a site that bitches about MS so much, slashdot gives them a helluva lot of free press.
:)
I think it's more a matter of keeping an eye on what the 298.6-kilogram gorilla is up to.
I watched C-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhauser gate.
Of the top five cellphone manufacturers, only Samsung Electronics has said it would use Microsoft Windows-powered Smartphone 2002 software.
From the looks of things Nokia has a decent shot of keeping Microsoft out of yet another business.
Sig (appended to the end of comments you post, 120 chars)
"I mean, honestly, for a site that bitches about MS so much, slashdot gives them a helluva lot of free press."
Amen brotha. You know why? More people love to bitch about MS that anything else. So far I have seen about 15 posts talking about BSOD's, Ctrl-Alt-Delete, viruses, etc...not a SINGLE ONE talks about the technology or the phone.
sad ain't it?
Sent from your iPad.
Why?
Because Microsoft is the (currently) largest commercial software producer. (yes thats a period)
When the largest company in any name space announces a new product for a new product space its indicative a (possible) new trend in computing.
So new trend + OS + mobile phone + applications = News for Nerds Stuff that matters.
Also it may also encourage your stock picks on your 6 month portfolio rebalance. I mean I wouldn't bet on any comercial company in a product space to compete directly with microsoft.
$sig=$1 if($brain =~
While consumers tolerate their desktops crashing, I don't think they'll tolerate it in their cell phones. Dropped calls are bad enough.
Of course, as folks have mentioned, virii are also a problem.
Perhaps what could actually happen is that this could cause MS to take a harder look at software quality.
-jbn
Just thought I'd drop you a line about the sort of things I would like on my cellphone.
Some features I don't want
- Internet Explorer inextricably embedded into the OS
- Visual Basic scripting
- .NET, or
.anything for that matter
- Any sort of web server
- Outlook, Exchange, or Hotmail
- Buffer overflows
- Passport authentication
What I would like is- to be able to enter a number and make a phone call
Thanks,Intro.
I never even heard about his book (The Road Ahead). It reminds me of Mein Kampf -- where Hitler said exactly what he was going to do and how he would rule Germany, and Europe, and the world.
Nobody paid attention until it was too late. (Maybe that's yet another similarity between the two...)
(If you feel the need to flame this post -- you're taking it too seriously -- get a life!)
The Wandering Hermit
With domestic appliances becoming smarter everyday and now embarking more computing power than NASA had when Armstrong put foot on the Moon, it is no surprise that all the major operating system vendors try to conquer this new market. This trend has been going on for quite some time now.
The real news here are that Microsoft is again trying to conquer that market. This is a big challenge for them, because the OS design there is at the opposite of what they usually manufacture: you can't put a system that crashes randomly, or that eats all the CPU and all the batteries of the device. It seems previous incarnations, that is mostly Windows CE, failed to do that.
They have good designers and the fact that "this is Windows" makes it easy to sell the devices. If they manage to make an OS that stays afloat, they might very well find themselves in a strong position in this market. At least, I think they have much more chances to win here than on the server market.
I'm glad to hear that 4 of the top 5 mobile phone vendors aren't taking this bait, but I cringed when I read the following:
These include the capacity to offer multimedia text and picture messaging, or simpler access to corporate email or common business software programs, to mention just a few of the growing ranges of functions from such higher-powered phones.
Where:
'corp email' == Outlook && 'common biz software' == Office
Which got me thinking, that yes, that would be nice, I wonder why the Java developers haven't done that yet as well with the phone dev kits that are already shipping. The answer, of course, is that none of those protocols are open and thus can't.
Did the proposed anti-trust settlement address this point? This is *classic* Microsoft market-leveraging behaviour. Without this point of leverage, I would expect this initiative to fail because battery life is too precious to waste on the inevitably large memory/processor requirements of this OS. (Of course, I'm assuming bloated code here, does anyone have any idea what the resource requirements are?)
Stephen
Wasn't Microsoft Supposed to be stopping all new development and working on improving security? How come they just announced a new product? I guess the concentrate on security PR compaign didn't work out.