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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."
I can't help but feel Microsoft has been wedged out of the mobile market by competitors that are specialized at doing everything better then they do.
Wanna be a cool kid with a pretty phone?
Apple has you covered.
Need something uber business savvy but easy enough for a monkey in a suit to use?
Get a blackberry
Want a phone that doesn't hold you down?
Get an Android phone
Want a phone that runs on POS hardware and can barely handle anything?
Oh crap, umm...no.
What they do have, however, is excellent proprietary stuff like ActiveSync that's integrated into all these other cell phones. If I was them, I would focus on developing technology like that. Let the mobile market work for you, not the other way around.
The Kin is an interesting attempt to wrangle the teenybopper market but I think they've already fallen to the iphone.
it's called ActiveSync. Apple and Google both license it. Google even licenses it for Google Docs sync over the internet and have extended it. Microsoft doesn't need to pour money into R&D and market a phone since they probably make more money by taking a cut of every iphone, ipod touch, ipod and most Android phones sold.
as far as shipping crap, Apple and Google do the same thing. Only reason Apple shipped the iPad during the slowest shopping time of the year is to work out the bugs before the next holiday season and get market share before everyone else. my iphone hasn't been completely stable until 3.1.3. there are reports of Droid phones rebooting for no reason. The Nexus One had all kinds of problems. It took HP 2-3 years of firmware and driver updates to make their Proliant G5 servers stop rebooting due to a bug in the iLO firmware. OS X 10.6 hasn't been out a year and it's almost on service pack 4 where all the updates are larger than the OS that shipped last year. everyone ships crap these days.
the big mistake that Microsoft seems to be making is they have given up the low end of computing. Smartphones and tablets. historically every time a new competitor takes over a market is by getting the low end first and then using that to attack the high end of the market. MS did this with Windows. it was crap compared to other OS's but cleaned house because it was easy to use and deploy. now with Windows Server 2008 R2 Microsoft is finally shipping a server OS with features that UNIX had in the 1990's. SQL Server is the same way. not as good as Oracle of DB2, but good enough at the right price for a lot of customers.
I have an E71, and to me it looks like MS have already been playing with it. Especially when you consider what a lean and clean OS Symbian's ancestor (EPOC) was by comparison.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
I'm trying not to sound condescending here, but are you kidding me? Have you ever used a Windows Mobile phone before?
I've been using Windows Mobile since the 2003se days and it has been light years ahead of whatever competitor was pumping out. Things like multitasking, a somewhat open platform for development, and an interface that makes sense.
The only downside has been the long time insistance from manufactures to only use 64mb of ram. Nowadays that number is up to 256mb.
HTC has a number of drool worthy phones that spec wise pound the iphone to dust and anything that Palm can come up with.
And finally Microsoft leaves its homebrew ROM kitchen development alone. Sites like PPCGeeks.com and xda-developers are two that come to mind.
It's sad that people disregard Windows Mobile. It is nothing like the desktop crap. And seriously what major software or hardware manufacture doesn't pump out crap and fix it later? At least Windows Mobile works out of the box.
Disclaimer: My first PDA was a Sony Clie. I loved Palm and used it for many years, but it's time to use a real device and software.
What is clear is the mobile phone industry does not support the concept of a closed software base on which hardware is hacked to make it work. Two of the major mobile phone OS, Symbian and WebOS were derived from code that was developed to support an integrated PDA device, and is now open so it can be customized to a device. iPhone OS of course is completely open to Apple who can do as they wish to create an completely integrated product.
If Google can gain real traction with Android then there might be a little hope for MS. Even though Android has the advantage of being open to manufacturers, it has the same disadvantage of being at least partly controlled by a company that does not count the end user as the primary customer. Both Google and MS are tried to jumpt start the market for it's products by creating a reference device(the nexus one and kin) but it is not clear that either attempt will work. In the Android case it might become so fragmented that Apps are not going to be compatible across the devices. For MS, there is frankly little reason for a manufacturer to use the mobile product. Such a phone would either directly compete with Blackberry or Android, with little differentiation, and, unlike xBox, the manufacturer will have little incentive to sell the phones for a loss.
"She's a scientist and a lesbian. She's not going to let it slide." Orphan Black
Windows Mobile is alright if you're into pen based computing. The iPhone/Android devices are touch based devices though, different paradigms apply.
Note: I've been using Windows Mobile since it was called PocketPC back in 2000. Yes, I still have an original iPaq, sleeves and all.
First smartphone was a Windows Mobile device, next one was an iPhone, currently using a Palm Pre, and next month I'm about to purchase an HTV EVO 4G(Android device).
Nokia did a "me-tooo!!" online software store. It couldn't engage developers and it flopped.
Android started it smart with the summer code-challenges almost a year before the first phones came to the general market and have now the power to offer phonevendors the ease of NOT having to design an OS or upgrade/modify what they have for each phone model they release.
Microsoft still looked like they buttkicked PalmOS and went into a comfy zone "no competition. We know it sucks balls, but hey, what are your alternatives, management boy? Here, have a free magnetic stylus, so you can sync exchange."
Android has put Microsoft to shame with their pants on their knees in a "developer developers!" conference, touchscreening it to youtube and twitter while the WM6 guys are, well.. sortof trying to find the right program files folder and waiting a bit to open their browser...
Microsoft will have to "pull another IE" to get "sortof back in the game". The same way they are now throwing in everything to be ready for HTML5 and are a bit neglecting canvas.
They thought their honeycomb design on WM6 would be sufficient to give Android surprice buttseks, but they've been surprice-somethingelse'd themselves right now while they thought they had full game
I think we can keep recursing like this until someone returns 1
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.)
If I read correctly, you have to have more than 500 employees before Apple will allow you to do that and it's quite simply not the way the industry works, at least not in my country.
What actually happens around here is that you have a lot of small shops which actually develop the app with, say, a dozen or so employees. Margins are fairly thin and there's a lot of competition so you'll probably never have a 500-employee mobile data outfit. The core product is then sold on to a number of larger firms and most of the deployments are less than 500 units each.
Much as I dislike Windows Mobile, it and CE are still the best platform for doing this kind of thing, with full native development and no dicking around with approval unless you need to do kernel-level access. Though the firm I work for is starting to branch out into Android as well. While I'd love to develop for the iPhone, it doesn't look like we're going to be allowed to.
That's not really a viewpoint that a company should take. "Microsoft" is a nebulous entity. To say "we" aren't good at anything from a corporate is stupid, and ties a company too tightly to it's current staff.
If the company's current staff isn't doing well in a market that they wish to be a player in, then you replace them. There's no reason to assume that merely having the Microsoft logo embroidered on their company shirts is going to make a talented group of people perform worse than if Google or Apple's logos were on those shirts.
I just think that whatever group that goes in, needs to understand - WINDOWS does not translate well to a mobile device. The world doesn't need a Mobile Windows OS. What they need to do is develop a completely new Microsoft mobile OS from the ground up, with mobile in mind.
And for goodness sakes, get some good UI people on board. Their latest attempts - those damned "Kin" phones, look like the UI people were playing around while designing it and thought: "I wonder just how much we can fuck with this and get away with it?" My 2 year old niece has Leap Frog toys with better UI's than those phones.
"People who think they know everything are very annoying to those of us who do."-Mark Twain
Slow, unresponsive, shittastic. An utter embarrassment. A wank-stain on the face of technology. Windows Mobile products make the users want to kill themselves as opposed to iPhones which only make the people who build them suicidal; in use the iPhone is actually quite enjoyable.
Kwisatz Haderach
Sell the spice to CHOAM
This Mahdi took Shaddam's Throne
It was the version that broke away from being a native Mac application and used a Windows cross-development library, resulting in a bloated, under-performing piece of crap derided by users and reviewers alike.
I'm sure Steve Jobs remembers this very well.
I actually agree with you about this in every other case, but Microsoft is a special case. Analysts are already saying that "Failure is not an option." Sigh. I guess we'll have to have one more iteration of this. Here's how it goes:
Normally I'm not one to praise Microsoft's end results, but I'm not stupid. They hire the brightest minds from the best schools with strong foundations in classical IT art as well as contemporary vision and they work them to death because that hazy zone between exhaustion and physical failure is a special point where human brains integrate at miraculous levels. Microsoft has known this for twenty years and organizes its workers accordingly. These folks driven in this way can make an awesome mobile OS, they did, and I'd love to have a copy of the source for that bad boy. These Microsoft developers made a rock solid performant and genuinely innovative phone OS which is the core of Windows Phone 7. It's tiny, boots fast, suspends and resumes instantly, and pinches ergs like they're made of platinum. It has an intuitive touch-centric interface. It works flawlessly with all the latest technologies - hell, it'd make a great HPC OS if these jerks would think out of the box now and then. This was about two years and three reorgs ago. This is the mockup they'll trot out to the major phone vendors hoping to get them to push the platform - short a few apps but you can see the potential because it's beautiful, intuitive, responsive. They built an app store for it, and shopped the mockup around to app developers under NDA. Some of the AC posters here even have it and they're in awe of its incredible flexibility, its power, its potential - and they should be because this bare OS rocks. They float an early 2009 release date to some of their preferred pundits even though it's not finished yet because that's how you feed a flackalyst.
It's a killer mobile OS but it's not a Windows yet. For six months they put some finishing touches on the version they intend to ship - integrating Bing search and Windows Live services into everything, building the Mobile Office apps for it, porting Silverlight, .NET for mobile and a bunch of other stuff. This is leveraging the platform so that it pushes all of the other Microsoft platforms because making products that can be extracted from their internicine application and server dependencies is not the One Microsoft Way. The shipping version then ran like a dog, leaked memory like a seive and crashed every few minutes. So eighteen months ago they rebooted the team and tried again. They got the same result, so nine months ago they reorg the group from higher up and try again. The new group can't get the thing to work right in nine months, so yesterday they reorg the entire entertainment and mobile division to be directly under Steve Ballmer and reboot their efforts yet again. This product was supposed to ship in early 2009. It is not even close to ready. It probably never will be because all of these internicine ties never did work well, are a moving target, and have reached an insurmountable level of complexity for a mobile device which must by definition be the ultimate in computer reliability and stability while remaining cutting edge in a dynamic market. It literally can't be done.
Even today Microsoft executives are shopping around that slick mockup that no end user is ever going to see to their phone partners at the manufacturers and carriers, playing the push/pull game. "You want this. You need this. You're going to want to start planning the marketing around this product right away. This is going to be a slam dunk! And look - it says Microsoft on it everywhere so you know businesses are going to eat it up. [Hushed]It has IE and Outlook." / "Of course, this iPhone killer isn't for everybody - it's exclusive to our special friends. Committed friends l
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