Joe, good luck on shaking that flu.

You noted: "But Microsoft has got to move quick."

I'm curious. Can anyone give an example of Microsoft moving quickly in the past and doing it well?

I'm not trying to bait -- I just can't think of any.

It is really a shame. They underinvested in this area and have been last to market with everything. They have a real advantage in their back pocket in the development tools. I picked up a Zune yesterday, downloaded the XNA Studio Express 3.0 beta, and dropped a hello world application using three lines of code and 5 minutes onto the Zune. If we could do that for Windows Mobile the world might change. J2ME is out to lunch for making the bar too high to get into the space. Microsoft has the ability to mobilize a development community while Apple governs which apps it deems acceptable for the iPhone. WinMo is instead stuck in the dark ages with poorly stitched together dev tools which is worse than the overload approach Apple is taking.

Chip : wrote

"You noted: "But Microsoft has got to move quick."

I'm curious. Can anyone give an example of Microsoft moving quickly in the past and doing it well?

I'm not trying to bait -- I just can't think of any."
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Believe me, I am no Microsoft shill... ( I am a Linux shill...I get free software from Linux...lol).

Anyway I could think of only two times where MSFT moved quickly. (Or at least I thought they did).

I think ( and correct me if I am wrong), that WMA and plays for sure DRM was released fairly quick. I despise DRM, but it was pivotal in the beginning for allowing artists to sell digital music tracks online (other than I-Tunes) of course. It also allowed legal subscription music services like Yahoo, Rhapsody, Virgin and (the legal version of ) Napster to develop.

Sometimes MSFT moves quickly to release emergency patches when it is important enough.

Having said that, they moved too quickly ( despite delays...oxymoron ...lol ) on Vista and look at the result. They should have waited a year later to release it with the built in SP1).

The Internet. In 1995 on December 7th, Microsoft successfully changed the entire make up of the company to go after the client side and server side of the Internet (not the Google web site side, but the infrastructure). IE, IIS, ASP, connectivity in Office, shared nothing clusters in SQL Server, etc., etc. That was fast acting and a monumental change.

The other was GUI. Slow at first, but when the company decided, the moved quickly with Windows 3.0, Win 3.1, Windows for Workgroups, Windows NT 3.5, NT 3.51, NT4. It dominated and owned the GUI.

Funny thing; Joe, Microsoft bought Danger (SideKick) and has yet to use this purchase to make a move on the smartphone market.... really bad!

"Funny thing; Joe, Microsoft bought Danger (SideKick) and has yet to use this purchase to make a move on the smartphone market.... really bad!"

They bought Connectix years ago and got the best VM technology & IP available anywhere. AFAIK none of it has ever seen the light of day in a Microsoft product.

Maybe, just maybe, Microsoft buys worthwhile stuff with the full intent of killing it dead and burying the corpse two miles deep.

Monopolies are like that.

Re: "Can anyone give an example of Microsoft moving quickly in the past and doing it well?"

Yes. Sometime close to the founding of Microsoft, Bill Gates moved quickly to monetize software and lay out the company's future strategy to best lock in a monopoly position through shrewd deals. While the rest of the industry rested their belief that the big profits were in hardware and that software only greased the hardware deals, Microsoft alone saw the vast potential financial gain to be made in software.

Today, Sun exists mostly because of the deal they made with Microsoft to keep them afloat. However, they alone made the best success from a non-IBM-funded growth curve, unlike Intel and Microsoft who depended on IBM's benevolent stupidity in the PC arena to provide much of the initial growth push.

IBM's revenues are mostly dependent on hardware (zSeries mainframes, especially) and services; they muffed mass-market operating system software badly, AIX being relatively successful but very expensive to produce and maintain, OS/2 being expensive and short lived, AIX PS/2 being quirky and never recovering from its Version 1.2 debacle, and Workplace OS being aborted when only a barely recognizable fetus.

I think Apple is doing so well because they alone seem to know how to merge proprietary hardware and software into one smooth and compelling product. Well, in the PC and personal gadget markets, anyway. Looking around the industry, Garmin, Honeywell, Avidyne, Chelton, Rockwell Collins, and others so the same hardware+software integrated thing as Apple does in the PC market, and they do rather well at it in the avionics market.

Its still early days. This market is in its infancy. There are so many innovations to come and I believe Microsoft along with Apple will be at the heart of it. The richness and native experience of the web on mobile devices and the various form factors has not reached full circle. I believe through Microsoft's platform and user expectations we will see a lot of cool stuff happening once Windows Mobile 7 is released in the near future. Stop making the year 2010 look like dooms day Joe. PC's will still dominate.

Windows is dominant on notebooks and those are expected to increase. You say 1 billion cell phones are sold each year. There is a logical reason for this, people change their phones regularly than they do their PC. So the analogy does not really apply here. I user can have a 5 year old PC and upgrade through 2 to 3 versions of Windows in its life time. With cool form factors coming into the market like Netbooks, that will carry Windows, then its given that Microsoft is in the best position here. Even an ASUS CEO said that Windows 7 will be on netbooks from the Company next year with new innovative features like Touch.

Lets wait for the next quarter. It can happen that everybody who wants iPhone aready bougth it and sales will go back to 2 mlns.

But if Apple start an iPhone ads campain showing how stupid Simbian, RIM, Win Mob and Android users are... this would help :)

Microsoft’s Richard Sprague eats crow on iPhone
http://blogs.zdnet.com/Apple/?p=2427
In a blog post in 18 January 2007 Microsoft’s Richard Sprague wrote:

So please mark this post and come back in two years to see the results of my prediction: I predict they will not sell anywhere near the 10M Jobs predicts for 2008.

Then, in a hardly-concilliatory post today, he writes:

Most of the reaction is just simple gloating: “ha ha, you idiot” kind of stuff. But I’m curious what people really think. What did I get wrong? Was it the technology–the phone itself is just far, far better than anything else? Was it the marketing? Was it something else?
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Well, Shall we listen more predictions of MS' fans? I could bet.

Marco :wrote

"Well, Shall we listen more predictions of MS' fans?"
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Time is the ultimate truth teller if something is going to be a success or a flop ....everything else is hype, speculation or well placed paid comments.

According to IBM's press release, "50 percent of consumers would substitute their Internet usage on a PC for a mobile device."

What M$ needs to do is to work with HTC to develop a relatively low cost WM7 phone with a full face LCD screen and then incorporate the Intel Atom processor.

Then, they need to develop a really nice integrated docking station for the phone that includes a nice LCD monitor with a built it GPU that takes over for the one in the phone when docked. They could also add a couple of GBs of internal memory to augment that the mobile phone has. Give the user at least GBs of on-board RAM for storage, and then consumes would have what they need to start ditching a separate PC / laptop.

"Shall we listen to predictions of Microsoft fans?"

Shall we listen to predictions of Microsoft bashers? Face it, predictions are nothing more than guesses, and they can be wrong. We'll see if Joe's are right or wrong in time.

By the way, Joe, how many "death blows" does it take to kill a company? Microsoft and Windows Mobile are still here, so I guess they werent "death blows", eh?

Do you guys really know what is killing microsofts mobile strategy?? Really?? Well let me just tell you then, its the absolutely useless behaviour or windows mobile on phones like the constant freezes and need for a reboot and constant failure of the os to keep going instead of just falling in a heap that make manufacturers say hey, get this trash off our phones. I mean how many times can you take a cheap phone back for repair only to find its constantly the os that is giving the problems not the hardware. Windows mobile increases costs of repair by making phones come back for an upgrade to make them reliable when the hardware is not at fault.

I predict HTC will ditch windows mobile sooner than you think and thats why theres no strategy from microsoft, they know thier os is history and they have given up. No one wants additional support costs on razor thin mobil phone margins while they are paying money to the supplier that is causing them the loss.

And as a side note , dont forget that americans will go back to the forest lol.

@ Colin Bowern
Just curious if you've ever used the .NET Compact Framework or SQL Server Mobile Edition. If you haven't, check them out. Very cool stuff.

MS' problem in the PDA market is marketing. The market is filled with BlackBerry and iPhone ads. MS simply doesn't do enough of it. I know that in terms of capabilities and scalability (what specialized business tools I can develop for the PDA) using Visual Studio, it's hard to find something that competes with WM in that respective area.

I've used and evaluated the iPhone and for true business initiatives, IMO it just doesn't cut it. Its fashion is phenomenal, but its function is mediocre WIZBANG stuff. I already know of a few biz execs who bought into it and dumped it a short period of time later for BlackBerry devices. IMO, stick with RIM or WM if you need a business critical device.

@ KatKit
Not that it matters, but I have been running an HTC Touch (originally with WM 6.0 now WM 6.1) for nearly a year now without a single issue. That includes Exchange integration, Outlook and synching documents (all using BlueTooth). HTCs product line is very successful and fairly rooted in WM (http://www.htc.com/www/product.aspx). I think the idea of them ditching WM is unlikely, but who knows.

Just my opinion :) Cheers everyone

First off sorry for the late reply, but I had to respond to you Katkit. You said "its the absolutely useless behaviour or windows mobile on phones like the constant freezes...."

I have had exactly the same thing! I posted about this a few threads ago. Ive been living the WM nightmare on my MDA Mail for the past year, and have experienced just that. - Its certainly a mistake I wont make again. Ive just got a few more months before I can get an upgrade, and it certainly wont be MS that has control of my mobile next time.

@GNH:

You are describing "geek" features where WM > apple. That is really the crux of where the companies differ. Apple is a consumer electronics company. It's appeal is ease of use and design attractiveness. Microsoft is a geek company. It's appeal is more features. Saying .net framework or sql server is "very cool stuff"... Very cool to geeks. Not consumers. The consumer market is much larger than the geek market.

Geeks don't "get" apple. I've watched them for years, asking why do people buy ipods when they can get 100 cheaper clones that have more features. Answer -- those are geek arguments. Consumer appeal is that ease of use and design attractiveness.