I am pumped up and extremely excited! I’ve been writing about digital convergence and the need for smart phone vendors to embrace multi form factor OS families. I talked about the commodization of hardware and user interface usability. I’ve written about the consumerization of technology the immergence of the prosumer. On September 21st 2010 I wrote an article titled: About the Future of Mobile Phones. In that article I stated that I am backing Microsoft in this race… and boy how good I feel today!
As Elop stated in his internal memo, its all about the ecosystem. As I’ve written so many times, the leading vendors are close enough on usability (iOS, Windows Phone 7, WebOS, Android, BlackBerry OS 6) and hardware innovation has become a commodity (HTC and ZTE). It is all about what you can do with the device… the apps that run on it.
What will happen once the top 3 ecosystems have pushed hundreds of thousands of client based (on-device applications… notice the play on on-premise versus cloud) in to their respective application marketplaces? How will they differentiate then? There is already more iPhone/Droid/Windows Phone 7/BlackBerry apps available than I could every possibly even sample… even with one vendor.
In the first wave of differentiation it will be about more mature, integrated and hence higher value applications. Windows Phone 7 already has tight integration with business foundational solutions, such as Office 365, Exchange Online (Outlook Mobile), SharePoint Online, Lync Online and Dynamics CRM Online. What about for consumers: Azure and xBox Live. We will see apps integrate seamlessly through the full product stack. Apple and Google also have business productivity and consumer core solutions that they can integrate with. Where Apple rules the consumer, Microsoft kills in the professional user space hands down. BlackBerry and WebOS need to integrate with another vendors core solution stack making them second tier straight out of the gate.
Well lets assume that all three have tightly integrated mature apps. What next? Cloud computing is the next frontier for application development, where content resides in the cloud and rich clients/web interfaces access content through an intelligent backend with near limitless resources and access to data cross multiple solutions. What is Apple’s and Google’s PaaS play? Google cloud with App Engine and Android Cloud to Device Messaging (C2DM). MobileMe cloud content vault and Apple’s recent North Carolina datacenter with run cloud iTunes in the future. I am still keeping my bet on Windows Azure.
Lastly I’d like to make the point that the line between mobile, slate and PC developers is gray at best. All forma factors access the same data through the cloud. All solutions have application interfaces for all form factors with similar user interfaces modified slightly fit the form and capitalize on all the form related functionality. Visual Studio should enable a single R&D effort that will ultimately branch out to cover all form factors within the Windows OS family.
Nokia developers! It is time to embrace Windows and be all that you can be. You are betting on the winning horse!
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