Microsoft sees mobile phones as adjuncts to the desktop and laptop PCs where it dominates. "People are demanding more out of their phones -- in multimedia, in how they surf the Web -- and they want the exact experience as on their PC," Rockfeld says. "Windows mobile is a great complement to the 1 billion PCs [worldwide]," he says.
Rockfeld cites as an example the experience of fishermen in the Indian Ocean, who, he says, use Windows Mobile phones to check the current price of fish at various ports, then steer for the one with the best price. There was one such project in 2007, though this reference doesn't mention what kind of mobile phones were used. And Harvard University's Robert Jensen earlier researched the impact of cell phones on fish prices in India's Kerala state, though neither the linked article nor one of Jensen's technical presentations mentions the type of mobile phone.
Rockfeld says users in emerging countries, whose first Internet and computing experience increasingly is with a smartphone, will want to "progress to [Windows] desktops" once they experience Windows Mobile.
Unless perhaps they experience the Apple iPhone. Or Research In Motion's BlackBerry. Or a Symbian smartphone. Or a Linux smartphone.
It's a fragmented world.
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Reprinted with permission from Networld World. Story copyright 2008 Networld World Inc. All rights reserved.
Comments
The outcome of the so called "fragmentation" is increased competition and evolution. MS arguments would be right if it would be the case that all consumers knowingly prefer different MS platforms to other alternatives. Claiming that this would be the case is simply ridiculous.
Consumers deserve better devices that inflexible Windows platform.
As to fragmentation - I wonder how many different Windows platforms there are after all and how well all different hardware manufacturers in China and India follow their specs if they even have got it?
To me it seems like market droids have spoken. The content is however meaningless blahblah.
I think the "fragmentation" topic is too muddled. Yes, there is a kind of fragmentation among Linux distributions and the different platform packagings, but there is no serious forking of Linux itself, which would be a fragmentation problem.
On the other hand, mobile handsets are different among each other and there are fragmentations in the service offerings and the capabilities of different carrier and phone combinations. My Symbian-based Nokia Communicator could not use the Internet services of T-Mobile because they went with a different arrangement. My current Windows Mobile T-Mobile Dash gets some things the communicator didn't have, doesn't have others (no provision of fax modem equivalent, for example, no IR coupling, etc.)
So, from a customer perspective, there is lots of fragmentation and choice of software platform on the phone seems to be completely hidden under all of that noise.
The platform difference for installable applications seems to be between developing for (a version of) Windows and (a version of) Java. Surprise, surprise.
don't have to worry about the platform?... no it has been standing still for the last couple of years so one should not be to fast to embrace MSFT if you are a developer... But they have one thing going for them, 20 million software sales at 14 dollar a piece... So when they say that OS is a small part of a product i can assure you that 14 dollars on bottom line for say a couple of million units is money well saved..again MSFT has to say what they say, where would they be otherwise?...Vista is such a success and gaining users by the day..or is that they sell vista and bundle Xp so statistics can say they are selling vista? Major corporation see no need to hurry to "upgrade to vista" many not at all, ever. Intel is one.
MSFT is in for a fight when symbian foundation has gathered the troops. in the flank apple is the silence helper of making it even more difficult for msft to "win" this time..at the very least it will take some smart strategy other then has been visible today.
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