Windows Mobile ? one more push?

Given that Windows Phone 8 is effectively the second version since the post-iPhone reboot, you could even invoke the old rule of thumb that Microsoft takes three attempts before it wins. So just keep pushing and you?ll do? OK. The Nokia takeover document proposes a 15% smartphone market share target, which is respectable, though hardly victory and a long way from classic Ballmerian bombast.?

The problem with this narrative, though, is that the problems with Windows Phone will not be fixed by product quality, execution, perseverance or capital. Nor can Microsoft count on the market leaders screwing up, which often helped out in the past. Rather, Microsoft is now on the wrong side of precisely the same dynamic that came close to killing Apple 20 years ago: developers are not choosing it.?

By the end of the year there will be perhaps 1.1bn Android phones in use, and around 300m iPhones. And perhaps 50m Windows Phones. That?s a very quick decision for most developers, and that trajectory is not changing. Can Microsoft brute-force its way through this? Perhaps. But it seems unlikely.?

This prompts the question of what else Microsoft might do. In any discussion of fundamental strategy it's helpful to recall an observation by Santayana: 'Fanaticism consists of redoubling your efforts when you have forgotten your aim.? What is Microsoft?s aim? Is it to sell lots of Windows Phones? Is it to extend the generation-old strategy of ?Windows Everywhere? to mobile? Or is it to be a vital, important and relevant platform and applications company?

Arguably, Windows Phone is just a tactic, and a failing one at that.?Microsoft, like Nokia in 2010, should move from denial to acceptance and work out what comes next.?

Marc Andreessen famously declared that the web would reduce Windows to ?a poorly debugged set of device drivers" (a good example of climbing out of the Trojan Horse before you?re inside the city). But how far down the device stack does Microsoft really need to go? 60% of revenue, after all, comes from enterprise and business services. Does Microsoft need to make the device drivers on a phone? The networking stack? The power management stack? It might like to, but does it need to??

It seems to me that a new Microsoft CEO must at least consider turning Android into a stack of poorly debugged device drivers. After all, Google has stolen Microsoft's natural place in mobile: it is Android that fills the role taken by Windows in the PC world. There is no free slot in the 'poorly debugged device driver' game. But there is a very big one in providing a stable, secure ecosystem, in providing a managed environment for enterprise, in corporate messaging, and in putting corporate documents onto mobile, on whatever platform. And even, perhaps, in providing a polished, safe consumer Android experience. Right now Microsoft is leaving all of that vacant. This screenshot, from a friend at a very big fund management company, is pretty damning. He's organised all his apps by ecosystem - compare Google and Good with Microsoft. Microsoft should not have allowed this to happen.?

Source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/TheTechBlock/~3/LlQhimXkb84/windows-mobile-one-more-push

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