“Microsoft hopes to create what it hopes will become a major new category of consumer device—the ‘Windows phone.’ Until now, the company has been content to be a supplier of an operating system, called Windows Mobile, to phone makers such as Samsung and Sony-Ericsson, which in turn branded and sold the devices as they saw fit,” Peter Burrows reports for BusinessWeek. “The hope is to convince PC owners that a Windows phone is the most sensible choice to go with their Windows computers. ‘We’re going to double-down on the Windows brand,’ says Todd Peters, head of marketing for Microsoft’s mobile communications business. He says to expect a major advertising push. ‘When people go shopping in the future, we want them to ask specifically for a Windows phone.'”
“That would certainly be a change. Although it was a pioneer of the so-called ‘smartphone,’ Microsoft’s Windows Mobile software has little of the brand cachet of the Apple iPhone,” Burrows reports. “If successful, the Windows phone idea could extend the lock that’s helped Microsoft become one of the great cash-generating machines in business history.”
MacDailyNews Take: There’s a selling point: Even more Microsoft lock-in. Thanks, but, as always, we’ll pass.
Burrows continues, “The strategy faces many complications. In the PC business, Microsoft’s approach of signing up as many hardware makers as possible led to market dominance, as hordes of software developers wrote applications that could run on any PC, whether it’s made by Dell, Hewlett-Packard, Lenovo, or some other maker. But when it comes to the mobile-phone business, software must be tweaked to run on each different kind of phone—and for each network on which it works. As a result, many developers would prefer to focus on so-called “hero phones”—single models like the iPhone that garner monster popularity on their own. And analysts say Microsoft has lots of work to do on its basic mobile technology. While Ballmer is expected to announce an upgrade of Windows Mobile, dubbed version 6.5, the major 7.0 upgrade was recently delayed and now isn’t expected to reach the market until next year.”
Full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: Using the Zune debacle as our guide, it’s tough to imagine Microsoft ever figuring out that they’re too late to market for anything. Using Microsoft’s entire history as our guide, expect whatever they cobble together to be an upside-down and backwards derivative of what Apple did several years ago that ends up routinely frustrating the unfortunate ignoramuses who waste their money on Redmond’s latest piece of crap.
