Microsoft says viva la France!

This has been a busy week for Microsoft. After Monday’s Microsoft Surface announcement and Wednesday's announcement of Windows Phone 8, I feel it is necessary to see how the Smartphone/mobile world war is going. For those of you unfamiliar with what the hell I'm talking about in the past I've described the 6 available mobile operating systems as super powers at the end of World War 2. I'm going to keep on straining this analogy till it cries uncle, but for a recap: IOS was America, Android was the Soviet Union, Blackberry was Great Brittan, Windows mobile/Windows Phone was France, Symbian/Maemo was Germany, and WebOS in this analogy was Japan. Now that we know the players, where do we stand?


Let’s start with the failed states. Since we last checked in WebOS seems to have entered into a lost decade, likely never to reemerge. Unless BB 10 is some sort of amazing piece of tech heretofore unknown to this earth the only way to describe Blackberry is to say the gentle isle has an outbreak of Ebola. Meanwhile with the collapse of Symbian/Maemo, Microsoft and Nokia have formed their own little euro zone. At the same time Android and IOS are still fighting proxy wars all over with patent lawsuits, injunctions etc. sending "smaller" companies into chaos. Okay now that I can actually hear this analogy creaking let’s talk about what Microsoft did this week.

Microsoft announced Windows Phone 8 a major development in the mobile ecosystem. Why? Windows Phone 8(WP8) is built on the Windows 8 core. Previous mobile versions of Windows were built on Windows CE which limited the platform in a variety of ways. The most fundamental of these limitations being the tools available for developers. Moving to the Windows 8 core allows developers to easily port from standard Windows to WP8. In addition porting from existing platforms like IOS and android has also become easier. Moving to the Windows 8 core also greatly expands driver support for WP8 which will lead to greater hardware compatibility.  Lastly WP8 will benefit from greater enterprise IT support.

Microsoft with this announcement seems to have completed their pitch for becoming the center of your digital world. The Xbox will the media/gaming hub, Windows 8 for traditional computing both business and home, WP8 mobile again both business and home, they even have a foot into your car with sync. I have to say it is a pretty convincing pitch. For developers the tools Microsoft is promising sound amazing. Netflix for example could be made once and find a home on the pc, Xbox, and WP8 with minimal effort. Gaming could enter an exciting realm of immersion using all three platforms and again with support of DirectX on all three platforms development times are dramatically reduced. Enterprise will be able to have control and deployment options previously only available on the now struggling RIM blackberry. With things like skydrive and Xbox smartglass all of Microsoft’s offerings could be seamlessly connected. Oh and let us not forget the juggernaut that is Microsoft office.

All of this is very exciting, and very promising. That said it is a big gamble, not unlike the euro zone. Microsoft in all this is leaning heavily on the success of Xbox and their enterprise domination to support their struggling mobile solutions. Not only that they have refocused those successes to look and feel like their mobile solution. Two important questions remain. The first is will consumers and developers adopt metro. This is not a trivial question. Google released the Halo theme design guidelines with ICS, and while some developers have adopted many have not. Worse yet many manufacturers removed many aspects of the design guidelines with their skinned versions of android. With the next version of Windows, developers will have the option to develop for traditional Windows, metro, Windows Phone 7, and Windows Phone 8. Microsoft clearly wants developers to focus on metro and Windows Phone 8, but developers seeking the greatest reach are motivated to focus on traditional Windows and possibly Windows Phone 7 for the largest available user bases. The second question is how long will it take for that adoption to take place. It is no secret that adoption of new versions of Windows is abysmal and often takes years. Most businesses avoided Windows Vista all together and are just now transitioning to Windows 7 years after its release.

The last few years have been revolutionary for the mobile space. The two major platforms have carved out significant space but Microsoft has the resources to carve out a significant chunk of their own. In order for that to happen though developers have to pour resources into making the app platform more robust than the 100,000 available now on Windows Phone 7. It will be months before Windows Phone 8 actually reaches consumers hands and we must remember both Apple and Google have major updates to their platforms on the way as well. This fall will be an exciting new turn in the game of risk that is the mobile space; we will have to check back in then to see who can hold Kamchatka.