Windows 7's Mangled Mobile Opportunity

Windows 7 might as well be Vista when it comes to interacting with mobile devices. Microsoft's total mangling of this mobile opportunity reveals a number of major flaws that the company must address if it's going to continue to dominate the OS world.Buzz up!
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Microsoft must embrace the mobile space if it wants to get its act together. The company has a bunch of semi-independent units that don't seem to talk to each other very much: Windows, Windows Mobile, Xbox, Zune, and whatever has grown out of their acquisition of the Danger/Sidekick team. As Apple has shown, you create compelling experiences by acting as one company, not as five. Unfortunately, it looks like Microsoft still isn't talking to Microsoft.


The silo situation was likely born during the bad old antitrust days, when Microsoft had to avoid looking like a monopolist. But now that Microsoft doesn't have a monopoly on anything, it just looks like a mixture of confusion and incompetence.

Too Many Microsofts

One of Microsoft's fatal flaws is that it thinks in products, not in ecosystems. It builds a lot of attractive pieces, but it doesn't snap together the puzzle. For instance: what's up with the Danger/Sidekick thing, anyway? They bought Danger way back in February, 2008. Rather than folding that expertise into Windows Mobile, they shunted the team off into a mysterious "Premium Mobile Experiences" group that has so far produced nothing except a horrifying server crash. The latest we've heard is that something might happen next year. In any case, PMX seems to be competing with—rather than enhancing—the work of the Windows Mobile group.

Windows Mobile and the Zune have incompatible app stores. The Zune doesn't automatically work with Windows 7's default media player. At least the Xbox works as a Media Center Extender. Once again, we've heard that better integration between units may happen with Windows Mobile 7, which is coming out…someday.

Having an ecosystem doesn't mean not having partners. You don't have to be Apple and make your own hardware. You just have to make integration between teams a priority. Windows 7 misses an integration opportunity by appearing to abandon Windows Mobile, and it misses a market opportunity by not syncing with the billions of other mobile devices out there.

An Empty Device Stage

Most mobile platforms are now moving towards cloud-based syncing solutions. That's fine for a lot of things, such as e-mail and contacts. But large files like video, photos, and music still work best over a local connection, and local syncing is still relevant for folks who can't—or won't—rely on the cloud for all of their data (such as, say, once-burned Sidekick users).

Smartphones typically require heavy, clunky, proprietary software to sync—and I'm including iTunes for Windows in that list. Feature phones either don't sync at all or use extremely clumsy options. Apple tried to provide an easy syncing path with iSync, but it doesn't support most of the phones Americans own.

Windows 7's approach to mobile devices is something called "Device Stage," which looks fine on paper; it's a set of XML-based spec sheets that are like device drivers, but are much, much easier to write. The problem is that nobody supports Device Stage. Microsoft shunted off our questions about this by saying that it's up to phone manufacturers to adopt their new platform.

But I can't see partners giving a lot of love to Device Stage considering that Microsoft doesn't even support it themselves. Microsoft controls two mobile OSes: Windows Mobile 6 and their Danger/Sidekick platform. Neither works with Device Stage. I'm not convinced the Windows Mobile people and the Windows 7 people have even had a conversation about Device Stage.

We've seen the whole "we'll put hooks in, you use them" thing before. Remember Windows Vista Sideshow? That was supposed to let mobile devices act as remote controls and as information windows into Vista PCs. Never happened.

The smartphone market is booming, and Microsoft isn't doing too well in that space right now. Windows Mobile 6.5 is basically a placeholder, an interim update to a painfully ancient OS that's being left in the dust by Google and Apple. A strong link between the well-reviewed Windows 7 and the somewhat-creaky Windows Mobile 6.5—or between Windows 7 and mobile devices in general—could have given Microsoft some juice, given Apple some pause, and pushed the state of the art forward. Instead, Microsoft has missed yet another mobile opportunity with Windows 7.