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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 think maybe the best answer here is to just surrender. "Mobile? It's not our thing. We wanted it to be our thing - we tried. But we're not good at it." While they're at it maybe they should get out of search and online ads too.
I'm symbolset and the lack of Windows Phone 7 was my idea.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
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."
That is pure bullshit. It works for literally everyone else, including Apple. Or is all the stuff in iPhone OS 4.0 that Steve said wasn't included because it would make the iPhone suck not sufficient evidence for you? How about all the functionality in Android 2.1 that seems mandatory? This story is (-1, Troll).
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
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.
Invest in Apple?
The reason microsoft succeeded was because they wrote a great application called Word. In it's time it was truly great compared to the competition (word perfect for example). Other than being comprehensive and less clunky than open office it's not such a remarkable product anymore. But if you are bussiness or Govt you have to have a copy of it. It's the standard and you always get some document that the emulators don't open correctly, so you have to use it no matter what processor you prefer.
Windows I think rode on the coat-tails of this. Windows mac was a superior product up through version 5 but it was not fully compatible with the Windows version. As a result, windows OS became the preferred operating system for providing compatibility of word documents. This choice was cemented by the fact that windows ran on cheaper computers. But I think it was Word that was pulling the buggy, not the OS.
Ironically, Word 6 made the Mac and PC versions more interoperable by removing the advanced features from the mac product. But by then the product offered an integrated environment on the PC with outlook and server systems. So it still was better to use the PC than the Mac version for business.
If you were starting over today, the huge standardization on word probably would not happen.
This is the boat MS is in now with mobile computing. Word is behind the curve on being a first rate mobile product. If they don't get something better out there people may start to standardize on something else once the reasons become compelling enough.
I think that microsoft is fully capable of producing a first class mobile computing set of tools. Why they haven't is mysterious to me.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
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.
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.)
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
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...
"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.
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.
The problem with Windows Mobile is that MS has tried to leverage the Windows philosophy to mobile when it wasn't appropriate. They purposely made the OS be more Windows like even though the codebase has no relation to the Windows NT codebase. Yet at the same time it was sufficiently different from Windows desktop to frustrate users. While touch is available to WM phones, they didn't design the OS to use a different UI instead relying on the desktop UI with a few tweaks. In that aspect they just switched a mouse for a stylus and called it done.
They got away with it for a while because there wasn't much competition for them because they were really the only game in town for corporate users. Then RIM came along. But they weren't worried. But MS didn't think about for consumers as much.
Apple didn't bother to compete with MS in the corporate smart phone arena; they were making a consumer smart phone which was an under-served area. Apple when designing a smart phone realized that a consumer has different needs than a corporate user. They designed the UI and OS to be different.
Also in terms of hardware, MS has followed the same philosophy. They just make the software and other companies use it on their hardware. Problem for MS is some of their hardware partners put out crap. While Windows Mobile isn't the most stable OS out there, some of their partners exacerbate problems with their shoddy hardware. Apple doesn't have this problem because they control the whole stack. I'm not saying that MS should do that but they should do a better job of working with their partners to make sure Windows 7 isn't sabotaged by the hardware.
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
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
What Microsoft must do to save their mobile buisiness: Simple, in Microsoft Fasion, Download the Android ASOP Standard Source. Recomplie with every reference to Android replaced by Windows 8 Mobile. When anyone complains just wait until they sue. The judgement will be much less than the profit. rinse, Repeat. Ohh wait that was Win 3.x err Win95.. err Sorry Win2k ohh wait no Excel, oh nm must have been defrag.. oh dang I must have meant Internet Explorer... well, you get the idea...
"Computers are a lot like Air Conditioners" "They both work great until you start opening Windows"
Microsoft lucked up, then fucked up. Palm had the market cornered, but their OS didn't scale as well when people were starting to look to their phones for more functionality (the Treo came out a bit too late to save their dominance). Windows CE was an inefficient behemoth with an interface that was not at all tailored to small mobile screens. But, it had the features people wanted at the time and when hardware caught up with it, Windows CE dominated for a while. The familiarity and comfort of their brand was enough to get people using misplaced UI metaphors like start buttons and microscopic icons. Then, for some screwball reason Microsoft decided to effectively stick their mobile development in the backyard shed. They didn't do anything to address the serious bugginess and quirkiness of their support libraries like ActiveSync and the Windows Mobile Device Center app just complicated the desktop/device synchronization problem. If mobile development was a basketball game, I'd call the FBI in to investigate them for point shaving. But, I have to assume that their leadership simply didn't want to deal with it, just as they didn't want to deal with the Internet back in the late 80s.
So, just as they had sat idly by as fortune smiled upon them, they sat idly as their flawed platform drove more competitors into the market and customers away from them. Unlike sappy romantic comedies, you can't piss in your cornflakes, then expect a heartfelt speech will make everything alright by the time the credits roll.
I swear to God...I swear to God! That is NOT how you treat your human!
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
I never would have thought I'd be in this place. I love linux. I want computers to be open.
And Apple COMPUTERS are open. Full and free set of developer tools included on every MAC OS DVD. I have a whole host of open software on my laptop, ranging from R to Virtualbox. It depends on what you call a "computer" and what that means in terms of how you use it, how you interface with it, and what it does.
And now I really want Microsoft to stand up and push back against the closed Apple iPad model. I want them to come out really hard, and push something more open, and I want them to run ads explaining why Apple's way is a bad idea.
Apple is delivering an incredible and unique experience NOW. Microsoft, Linux, Android, etc, will not deliver a comparable experience this year (though there will be first-attempt slates based on these, just not comparable)... perhaps next year, eh? Meanwhile, I have four different book/research-paper apps, three comms/network apps, a RPN calculator, multiple drawing apps, multiple photo editing apps, a word processor, a spreadsheet, a presentation program (VGA output, too), photos, movies, music, multiple Twitter clients (and multiple other-social-media clients), games, flight tracking, GPS, multiple network sync/disk options, games out the wazoo, email, web browsing, task list managers, calendar, etc, etc. All on my iPad. Now.
It has a long battery life, incredible build quality and beauty, a wonderful feel, is totally natural to interface with, and I use it all day long. Apple's way is a "bad idea", how exactly?
Yes, yes, open is good. I just joined the OpenStreetMap site today, for example. But "open" is not necessarily as open as you think: cellphone restrictions on Android devices, for example, or the inability to upgrade an Android device to the latest OS, or apps being removed from the Android store, though people claimed that could never happen. And "closed" is not necessarily too closed for intended applications.
The whole point is that the iPad is not a computer in the traditional sense of the word. Just as your car is not a computer, even though it has an incredible number of CPUs in it and multiple networks connecting them. Who knows, perhaps iMacs will become iPad-like computers, with full MacOS, including developer tools, on it? But iPads are a different KIND of device and waiting years for open, general-purpose computers to look and feel a lot like an iPad doesn't really make sense. (And to repeat myself in a more metaphorical way, "'Open', you keep using that word, but I don't think it means what you think it means."
Sorry, but shipping crap that may or may not get fixed later on is how the entire industry works.
Actually, no. And the iPad is a good example. Quite a few no-brainer things were left out because they could not get them right: camera (there's a hole there for it, it's just not there), stock app, weather app, Book/PDF markup, printing, over-the-air sync'ing, etc. What is delivered is elegant and works well.
Yes, there are bugs. I have had apps crash. (Though interestingly, perhaps because of the lack of multi-tasking at this point, I've not lost any data.) No software is perfect, and certainly there will always be the tension between the suits -- who want to ship -- and the coders -- who often want perfection. But Microsoft did set the bar very high in terms of shipping software that is as close to useless, unusable, and outdated as possible yet still getting customers to buy it. I've gone with x.0 releases on many (non-MS) products over the years and NOT been burned (okay, on the iPad, I waited for the x.0.1, i.e. the 3G). It's not as widespread as you make out.
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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