The question on my mind is whether native development will continue to be the favored means of development on mobile platforms or if it will fade in favor of the browser as native development on the desktop largely has. Also is Silverlight's future hitched to the success of WM7?
It will, they just focused on UI and development ecosystem first and I'm sure the updated mobile IE will be a derivative of IE9 which isn't complete yet.
My theory is they wanted some way to get a bit of return on investment from WPF and thus WPF/E which became Silverlight. In 2007 or so who was to know that Apple would have the clout to almost singlehandedly drown RIAs in the bathtub.
Proprietary client side solutions don't make any sense with the advent of what is being called HTML5. Apple's refusal to support RIA platforms on iOS is just accelerating their demise.
XP, for example, has some level of support into 2014, so from a business perspective one can trust that they'll provide support for quite some time, that is something you won't get from Apple. How this has any bearing on a discussion of Microsoft's consumer relevance I am not sure.
I've been thinking about that lately. Consider the companies that the article compares them to in the consumer market: Google, Facebook, and Apple.
Google and Facebook identify individuals, track personal details of their lives to a degree beyond what most individuals can imagine, and then generate revenue by using those personal details. Apple on the other hand, as a hardware company generates revenue through planned obsolescence (and Apple is moving more and more toward consumer data collection as a major source of revenue).
For each of them one might argue that there is a misalignment between the revenue model and important long term interests of consumer. The problem for consumer oriented companies is that the easiest source of increased profits is simply raising the price of your products (reduced operating expenses are bounded by zero, increasing market share in mature markets is expensive, and creating new markets is very high risk).
Conversely, to a large degree, Microsoft makes products and provide services which contribute to their business customer's bottom line. This puts them in an entirely different position in relation to the consumer market, because their sales increase as with the economic expansion of their customers (a unique advantage of B2B sales over consumer sales).
Unlike Chrome, Microsoft doesn't send every keystroke in the IE address bar back to a server to be analyzed with the intent of targeting their customer. When you register your copy of Office, you're not encouraged to list your children with their ages and to post pictures of them on the web. And you can load up your copy of Office 97 in a Win95 virtual machine on a new Windows 7 system. Their B2B revenue model requirement that Microsoft align its interests with the long term interests of its customers carries over to their consumer markets.
I see Microsoft in the unique position to differentiate itself as "the company which protects consumer privacy." The requirements are not all that difficult, some changes to Bing, a realignment of Internet Explorer toward user anonymity, and proper positioning of WinPhone7. What's more, all these are things which are in the interest of many of their B2B customers and none would have meaningful negative impact on Microsoft's bottom line.
I'm more inclined to think the phone will fail for the same reasons the Zune did, too little too late. But then the media player market was much broader and more saturated in 2006 than the smartphone market is now so maybe it won't play out in the same way...
The worst mistake they could make is to kill it the way they killed the Zune. They're never going to launch a day one, version one product which will displace the iPhone or Android, it's going to take time and investment.
The real target should be that they've got 25%+ market share in three years time. That should be what they're aiming for rather than a success this year.
People replace phones every 12 - 24 months and that's rapid even in tech (most people don't replace laptops that often). Every expired contract is a new potential customer for Microsoft and that churn means that no-one can take their position for granted so it's realistic for MS to make solid inroads over time.
They didn't kill the Zune. WP7 is basically a superset of Zune - same service for music/video, same client software, (evolution/derivative of the) same UI. There're rumored to be phoneless WP7s in the works too.
Fair enough, kill was probably the wrong word but they seemed to lose interest in the Zune as it's own entity.
But it was actually a pretty good and if they'd stuck at it I get the impression it could have done better than it did. Perhaps it will revive with WP7 (though I see the software is still under development which is good).
As pointed out the Zune lives on but I think it'd be difficult to argue it really made a substantive splash in the market despite arguably being a superior device as well as having the (imho) very strong Zune Pass subscription service. We're four years in and I can count on one hand how many people I've known that owned a Zune. There are parallels with WP7 launch but the stakes are much higher this time around because the relevance of the desktop is waning for general consumer use and Microsoft needs something to replace it. WP7 is an inflection point, if it fails I think you'll see Microsoft go roughly down the same path IBM has as far as consumer relevance (unless perhaps they turn Xbox Live into a OnLive-esque games as service thing, which they are in a better position than Sony or Nintendo to do).
