Chances are if you were following the Microsoft announcement in Barcelona today that you missed the main story due to Steve Ballmer jumping around on stage speaking like he was about to beat up the press assembled there. What you missed though was the announcement of Windows Mobile Series 7. Despite some very pretty interface picture’s we’re still about six months away from a final version of the devices so it’s hard to say anything about Series 7 yet.
However, with the new iPhone coming soon, Android expecting multiple releases and Nokia releasing a new version of Symbian as well as having Maemo in the wings I can’t help but wonder if we’re overly spoilt for choice. In actual fact, Samsung just released the Bada operating system at the Mobile World Conference and Palm’s WebOS is still a decent OS despite USA only hardware not to mention good old Blackberry.
You see, no matter what operating system you might have on your super phone it all comes down to apps these days. While the Android Market and the Nokia Ovi Store are good, they’ll never beat the iPhone app store, not at the moment. It’s simply a case of momentum, Apple has about two years lead and a single, unified device to develop for meaning apps gets made faster. In the end game, Nokia and Google have the ace up their sleeve that they provide hardware for multiple types of users as well as multiple price points but this is something for another time.
What Microsoft does have is the world’s biggest desktop operating system and with that, access to the worlds biggest development houses. Companies such as Adobe, Corel, Intuit as well as massive providers such as SAP and Oracle all provide Windows desktop software. On top of this, you’ve got the best Office software bar none with the Microsoft Office software you’ve got a killer team. Now add in game developers and you’ve basically got the ultimate development teams for your new phone OS.
My thoughts are that this choice in mobile phone OS is all that will eventually differentiate the top end when hardware starts to get fairly standardized. The problem with this is that the amount of development time that goes into building an app for every platform means that development houses will have to make a choice in what system they develop for.
I hope in the future we tend to have more of the traditional Windows/Mac/Linux setup on mobile phones like we currently have with desktops. This way, you’re spoilt for choice but developers can choose their playing field based on specific characteristics.
That said, Series 7 is a huge step forward for Microsoft and if they pull it off, something they should be really proud of.
Enjoy this post? Subscribe to my RSS feed.
