Microsoft's mobility efforts: where are they going?
Tim Landgrave
Published: 08 Apr 2003 09:53 BST
At its recent Mobility Developer conference, Microsoft laid out its strategy for enabling developers to create next-generation location-aware applications. The new platform includes some existing hardware, software, and services, as well as new server products designed to decrease the time to market for corporations that want to offer products based on the platform to their customers. I'll describe the new Microsoft Mobility platform and discuss the Microsoft strategy for helping corporations to move into this important new market.
The mobility landscape
With the number of new PCs purchased each year (as opposed to those purchased to replace existing systems) beginning to decline, Microsoft recognised that the next battle will be fought for the software that runs or is accessed by the millions of portable devices that will be purchased over the next decade. Cell phones, BlackBerrys, pagers, Palm-powered PCs, Pocket PCs, and most laptop and tablet PCs will make up the vast majority of new computing devices. And they all have one thing in common -- they're designed to work when not connected to the corporate network. Moreover, the vast majority of the devices will also not be running a Microsoft operating system. This means that Microsoft has to figure out a way to generate revenue from the devices, and it has to provide its customers with a way to use its software to provide services on the devices.
It's not that Microsoft isn't trying to get a version of its operating system on each phone. At the Mobility conference, every major mobile phone carrier announced or showed support for a version of the full PocketPC operating system combined with a cell phone. Many announced support for the Microsoft SmartPhone OS, a scaled-down version of the PocketPC operating system designed for the average user. But the market-leading cell phone manufacturers still prefer other operating systems for their devices, primarily relying on the Symbian OS.
Symbian is a joint venture of several major mobile computing and telecom device manufacturers. They joined forces to develop not only the EPOC mobile wireless operating system but also an entire system designed to create and support Symbian OS phones. Unfortunately for Microsoft, it also appears that Symbian will implement Java as the language of choice (in addition to the existing support for C++) for applications built on the Symbian platform. Given that Microsoft will likely have only a small percentage of the overall phone market, how will it help corporations extend their existing Microsoft infrastructure onto these devices?
The .Net services play
When Microsoft introduced the .Net platform last year, one of the most underhyped aspects was its support for wireless devices. Microsoft extended ASP.Net with technology that allowed a developer to create an application for any mobile device that supported WAP, MHTML, or other mobile rendering technologies. Moreover, developers can write the application once, and the ASP.Net mobility libraries will interrogate the device and present the appropriate user interface based on its capabilities. With this spring's release of a new version of Visual Studio and version 1.1 of the .Net Framework, developers creating mobile applications will have all of these features plus a released version of the new .Net Compact Framework. The .Net Compact Framework allows VB or C# developers to create rich mobile applications for Windows CE-based devices without having to use the arcane C++ tools required today. (There is a VB version of those tools, but performance and distribution issues have kept it from being widely used.) The .Net platform provides all the tools necessary to create applications that target mobile devices whether or not they're using a Microsoft OS.
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