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What Microsoft Must Do To Save Its Mobile Business
GMGruman writes "Microsoft has tossed out its mobile management team (without admitting to doing so), but is that enough to make Microsoft matter in mobile? InfoWorld's Galen Gruman argues that a lot more is needed than a management change if Microsoft hopes to have a future in the emerging mobile world. In his blog, he lays out a tough five-point prescription for Microsoft to get back in the game. For starters, Microsoft has to get out of its well-established cultural mindset that it's OK to ship crap that it might fix later on."
Yes, yes they do. When I went there to purchase my iPad, the entire sale was done via an iPhone. They have little printers underneath the tables that print out your receipt too.
I'm pretty sure the Apple Shop uses them too. They certainly don't use iPhones to bill your credit card for purchases anyway.
They started out with Windows CE devices, which were horribly unreliable, requiring rebooting throughout the day. Now they use iPhones. No, really, an iPhone-based app, with an attachment that's like a slightly thick protective case with a card-reader on the back.
In that regard, Windows Mobile 7 is a step in the wrong direction, because the custom built corporate mobile app isn't compatible with the idea of a centralised app store run by which ever Steve is in charge of the company in question.
The app store has nothing at all to do with custom-built corporate apps. There's a totally different distribution method for that, under the control of the company doing the deployment. (My understanding is that at this point it needs refinement, that it's too much work for IT, but still, it's possible for a company to develop and deploy whatever apps they want without any involvement in the app store.)
ActiveSync is used to synchronize with the PC, when synchronizing with a server it's called Exchange... and Google has that for the e-mail, agenda and contacts. The best part of it: It has PUSH functionality and it works great with my WinMo phone. It generally just takes 3 to 5 seconds to see a change in Google Calendar appear on my mobile's screen. Since it's widely used in companies the Exchange server model is one of the few Microsoft products that works (fairly) rock solid...
Do your research. Microsoft did NOT write Word, they acquired it.
"the next generation Symbian will have Qt as user interface."
Qt isn't a user interface, it's a UI toolkit. The interface is almost completely orthogonal to this. Almost - you need a toolkit that can easily support the UI you want to build. But Qt, or GTK, or the Windows or OSX toolkits are all made for producing windowing user interfaces. Which is the cause of much of the trouble for Microsofts phone and PDA business, which doomed previous Linux-based mobile devices and which pushed Apple and Google to start from scratch with new systems specifically for mobile devices rather than trying to adapt existing stuff.
A heavily customized Qt - as in, forget source compatibility with desktop apps - may possibly work for a tablet-sized device. Qt for mobiles is likely dead from the start. If Nokia does make a serious go of it, it will have little but the name in common with the desktop toolkit.
Trust the Computer. The Computer is your friend.
EPOC was wonderful. I bought one used Psion Series3 after another for 10 years as they kept breaking, and/or performed surgery to replace the exhausted batteries, just so I could keep using the software. I looked at Blackberry, PalmOS, and WinMobile devices from time to time, but couldn't stand any of them. I finally retired the Psion last year, replacing it with an iPod Touch.
http://alternatives.rzero.com/
Ad Hoc Distribution Share your application with up to 100 other iPad, iPhone, or iPod touch users with Ad Hoc distribution. Share your application through email, or by posting it to a web site or server.
http://developer.apple.com/programs/iphone/distribute.html#compare