A Brief Appraisal of the Mobile OS Market: WP7 Edition at 12:00 AM

I had all of this really great stuff prepped for the fourth part in the ongoing series of A Brief Appraisal of the Mobile OS Market.  The first three having covered, of course, iOS (although this one's slightly sarcastic), Android, and webOS.  I had originally planned on going after RIM's Blackberry contingent.

They were the choice of crackberry addicts the world over, until they got out-innovated by just about everybody else.  But, with the recent purchase of Skype for a whopping $8.5 billion by Microsoft, their largest merger purchase ever...

Who am I to not take advantage of current events?

The purchase is somewhat indicative of Microsoft's overall mobile strategy.  However, before we get into all of that, let's examine the position Microsoft is coming from.

Microsoft originally broke into the market with some iteration of Windows CE (which stands for Embedded Compact, don't ask me where you go from EC to CE).  This morphed into Windows Mobile, and the latest version, Windows Phone 7.  Every single iteration until WP7 was made for styluses, just like Palm.  This decision was based on the overall prevalence of resistive touchscreens (or screens that relied on pressure for input).  Apple came in with the iPhone and a capacitive touchscreen (or screens that relied on electrostatic touch from fingers as opposed to resistive pressure) that worked quite well.

Game changer.  Microsoft did not innovate nearly fast enough.  They had the business market pretty well split up with RIM while Palm had been maintaining well enough in the consumer space.

All of a sudden you've got a mobile operating system built from the ground up meant to work with fingers instead of having to constantly grope for a stylus.  And three years later they were still relying on the stylus far too heavily.  In short, they got their asses handed to them.

So, Microsoft decides to go back to the drawing board: build something completely from scratch and try to make it nice and pretty and shiny, just like Apple.  If you've read the last two posts (webOS and Android), you'll see just how large an impact Apple has had on the market, but they have their own problems.  What they came up with was WP7, and it's not half bad.  Honestly.

Their problem is the same one that every late entrant has: developer support.  You can make the best OS in the world, and it's going to suck if you can't do anything with it.  Ask Palm (now HP) with webOS.  Ask the die-hard Apple fans with OS X (IN NO WAY AM I PERSONALLY SAYING OS X IS THE BEST DESKTOP OS).  But, it's Microsoft.  And they haven't done horribly, better than Palm/HP at any rate.

Nowhere near the 200k apps for Android, or however many iOS is up to (400k?  500k?).  In fact, if I recall correctly, WP7 is somewhere around 10k apps?

Well we've covered history, and kind of touched on where they are.  Where are they going?

Unlike everybody else, Microsoft is pretty much eschewing the tablet market.  Personally I don't know that it's the greatest idea in the world, but whatever.  What they are trying to do is quite interesting.  They're doing what they tried to do with the desktop OS ecosystem: control every core experience you're going to have.

In the desktop OS market, that meant the base OS, office productivity, browser, e-mail, whatever.  But if you move beyond the desktop OS, and it's a place that seemingly the rest of the industry is going, you need to think bigger.  And Microsoft is doing just that: by attacking your living room and mobile experience with an entire ecosystem of devices.

Ringing any bells yet?  No?  Allow me to enlighten you.

The Xbox 360 is far more than just a game console.  With Kinect, MS is pushing the envelope with how you experience entertainment.  Xbox Live allows them a personal portal into your TV free from any third party.  There are plans to actually get them to operate as set-top-boxes for TV.  Xbox Live also happens to be fully integrated into your WP7 experience.  In Skype, Microsoft continues the full frontal assault on entertainment and communication by controlling video conference calling and VOIP telephony.

Can you not now fathom some way where Skype can be included into Xbox Live?

Let's go one step further.  Microsoft is going head to head against Google and others in the cloud services area.  They already have a strong foothold in the enterprise market with the Office group of products, but their share is eroding.  With Lync and Office Communicator, they've been pushing into VOIP and video conferencing.  Problem is, it doesn't scale well at all.  See where Skype fits in there?

Bringing this bad boy full circle, up until a year ago or so, Microsoft was kind of lost.  They didn't have much direction if any at all.  Just a vague idea of where they wanted to go.  I think at this point they have a better idea than they did, but it's still not terribly well defined.  Two weeks ago, I would've told you they're still targeting the consumer market hardcore with all of the Xbox Live integration and the Nokia partnership.  The Skype acquisition places things into a totally different light.

They realized they can't cede the enterprise mobile market to the likes of Apple, Android, HP or RIM, so it's once again become a two-front war for Microsoft, and they're going to be trying it with an Android like approach.  They're focusing on building up strategic hardware partnerships and cutting crazy deals to get their platform on as many devices as possible.  Case in point, the aforementioned deal with Nokia.  The deal basically means Nokia is giving up on its own homegrown OS (in Symbian for phones and MeeGo for larger devices) and going exclusively with WP7 in exchange for billions.

This approach actually has the analysts at IDC, Gartner and a bunch of other research firms believing that by 2015, the Windows Phone family will be the number one global mobile operating system.  Without a tablet presence I'm not entirely certain that will be the case.  Is it possible?  Sure.  But at least one or two other entrants will have to drop out, and that's not looking terribly likely at this point.  Apple's going nowhere.  Google's pushing the envelope trying to get Android onto any device that can run code.  HP is the largest manufacturer of computing hardware and has an enormous enterprise presence.  RIM's the only real weakling in the bunch, for reasons which will be discussed later.

If all of this explanation seems like kind of a mess, it's because it is.  It's pretty indicative of the direction Microsoft has taken under the stewardship of Ballmer.  Except for their entertainment division, Microsoft has lost marketshare in just about every area they compete in.  And the entertainment division had to forgo profits for years before they were able to do anything with it.  Amusingly enough, it appears as if it's the entertainment division that's going to have to lead the way for Microsoft in what will likely become the post-PC world of the next five to ten years.