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Microsoft (and some of their partners such as HP) has been overly obsessed with the "Enterprise" market for mobile devices. This is a) a highly dubious move, since there are only so many uses for such devices in the enterprise other than as executive toys, and b) just really, really boring.
When a new release of Windows Mobile is, er, released, there's a good chance we'll get whatever business says it wants (the necessary sucking up to Gartner), but what about what consumers want?
In the early days of Windows Mobile new versions of the OS tended to bring clear improvements and new features that were useful to *everybody*, but in recent years we've seen entire releases devoted to incremental improvements to Mobile Office (or whatever it's called this week) and improved Exchange integration. These are worthwhile things to have, but what's in it for the people who don't have Exchange and find the idea of using Office applications on a QVGA device faintly absurd? In short, what's in it for the consumer?
The Pocket PC showed how shortsighted Palm were with their conception of the PDA as little more than a mobile Filofax, by putting a real computer in people's hands...and then unfortunately Microsoft decided to treat this fundamentally personal device (anything I can put in my pocket is personal) as a beige box.
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