11-08-2002, 11:09 AM
|
|
Pontificator
Join Date: Aug 2006
Posts: 1,177
|
|
Welcome Back Sendo
It feels like we're already in the aftermath of yesterday's big news. I am referring to Sendo bailing out on Smartphone 2002. I have for a long time enthusiastically waited for the Sendo Z100 phone to come out, and I am positive they would have done very well. It's sad to see them leave when the party just begun. Bottom line: this is a major mistake on Sendo's behalf, but perhaps it was unavoidable.
From a hardware design reference and software platform point-of-view and regardless of whether we look at Symbian or Microsoft, it is obvious that phones are heading down the same path that PCs did in the late eighties: commoditization of hardware and fewer viable operating systems. Major drivers for this trend are demands for more efficient software development and Internet connectivity. This could become a long, long discussion... but let's head back to Sendo!
It is not difficult to understand that a British, Swedish, Finnish or [insert-any-non-Asian-country-here] phone maker faces an enormous task to compete with efficient and high-quality factories in Asia. For a company like Sendo differentiation must and can happen at another level than pure hardware manufacturing and operating system development, and here is the heart of the issue: Sendo seems to believe that they can accomplish this differentation more successfully with a Symbian platform than with a Microsoft platform, which I fail to understand given the rich set of programming interfaces available to Smartphone developers. From a Microsoft point-of-view, I believe Sendo bailing out is a set back but not even a significant one. When giving this some thought, it would seem extremely strange if a paranoid software giant with mobile world-wide ambitions would place put that much weight in a British basket. Microsoft strategies and strategy execution is more clever than that. Back to the late eighties. Some companies placed their bets on Microsoft and some did not. We all know what happened.
The race is on and the race is long. I remember the year 2000 and the amount of media attention and discussions that different flavors of Symbian products and partnerships generated. I said then, as I do now, that Microsoft's main competitor in the mobile market is the Symbian consortium. Microsoft clearly needs to attract phone makers, carriers, get Smartphones to consumers and to the developer community to win. Although that must be this week's understatement, we know that the strategy is in place and has just begun to show results. The Orange SPV Smartphone, maybe one of the reasons why Sendo left, is extremely important but is just the first tangible result of a strategy with the following key elements:
� An operating system known and mastered by millions of developers
� State-of-the-art Software Development Kit and tool set based on principles known and mastered by millions of developers
� Partnerships with phone/PDA making companies such as HTC leads to short time-to-market schedules for anyone looking to build phones (carriers)
� A focus on a key player on the market (current state): carrier
� In the mobile market, Microsoft is the only player with a proven ability to keep a platform together in all aspects. Yesterday's phones are what made the market today, and those phones are "dumb terminals". Moving forward it is the quality of much more complex phone platforms and software that will drive success.
� The situation is familiar. Java, CORBA, IBM OS/2, UNIX, Linux, Netscape etc. Somehow, Microsoft performs at its best when perceived as the underdog and the main lesson learned is that dynamic persistence pays off.
� Internet. None of the players in Symbian have shown that they have a clue what's going on in the connected world. As an example, Ericsson said just two years ago that Internet would die and that they were to build a "Futurenet" with their own switches. Cisco was discussed as a potential company to buy but quickly dismissed as an insignificant Internet startup...
� Microsoft's massive resources that are patiently spent.
Instead of partying on this strategy, Sendo chooses to fight it. In my opinion, Sendo blew it but is more than welcome back!
|
| |
|
|
|
11-08-2002, 12:31 PM
|
|
|
11-08-2002, 12:39 PM
|
|
Philosopher
Join Date: Jul 2003
Posts: 541
|
|
Meh. Sorry, but I see this article as little more than MS FUD. There were legal, and programming issues (mostly concerned around customizability of the OS) around the relationship with Sendo's Smartphone, and Sendo didn't like that, so they took advantage of an open market and switched. Condeming a device just because it's not running MS, but in place, a proven OS for the task, which has a lot more capibilities than people give it credit for.
I'm all for rooting for MS products before it's released, but I'm not forr saying a device will be dead before anyone can use it, which is the impression I'm getting from this article.
I'd type more, but time is of the essence right now.
|
| |
|
|
|
11-08-2002, 12:41 PM
|
|
|
11-08-2002, 12:57 PM
|
|
Pupil
Join Date: Nov 2002
Posts: 19
|
|
It's a bit sad to see this site becoming an all around Microsoft campaigner. If it's not Microsoft than must be sh*t. Who said that MS development kit are polished etc etc has never really tried one. Before speaking it would be very nice that have some degree of experience with both OS, just looking at one screen and seeing "MS is prettier" just don't make sense. When you are not dealing with desktop pc, Microsoft, irrespective of their money, is just another player. It took three iterations to get a decent product called PocketPC, they pumped a lot of money into the professional version of the CE devices but apparently nobody bought one. The same applies to the tablet PC everybody is screaming about, seroiusly, how many people will buy at 3000$ portable because they can write with a pen on it? And the XBox? Any idea on how much money Microsoft is loosing on it? And please, wait for .Net, that will be a big blow. Ah, by the way, I guess that the millions of programmers you are referring to are for the Windows platform, because PocketPC is another story. It is good that not everybody gets paid by Microsoft to tell about how good they are, we still live in a free world! I wonder if I will be ever invited my MS at Seattle so I can change my idea as well.....
Cheers,
Lev
|
| |
|
|
|
11-08-2002, 01:09 PM
|
|
Pupil
Join Date: Jul 2003
Posts: 17
|
|
Unstrung writes:
Meanwhile, analysts at Lehman Brothers say that the decision to "terminate a product on which it has invested most of its time and money over the past several years when it is just days from shipping it to customers, whatever issues there were between Microsoft and Sendo, must have been significant."
More comments:
Microsoft's Mobile Meltdown [Sendo tells MSFT to stick it] (This article is originally from www.thestreet.com)
|
| |
|
|
|
11-08-2002, 01:44 PM
|
|
Thinker
Join Date: Mar 2004
Posts: 383
|
|
I second that, Leviathan.
I'm all pro-pocket pc, but I'm also conserned about this site becoming a place that just focuses on mindlessly promoting MS products and putting down all the others.
Whilst I realise that this site *is* a opinion site, I still feel that the overall credibility is at stake here if this site is just all about that. One-sided advertising, if noticed, tends to make people reject the rest of the text and even the smart observations by the writer, which is a shame.
|
| |
|
|
|
11-08-2002, 02:11 PM
|
|
Pontificator
Join Date: Aug 2006
Posts: 1,177
|
|
I never thought credibility would be brought up...
I lean on ten years of system architecture and development experience. My first encounters with Microsoft development tools took place in 1985, so one might conclude that I have "tried" "MS development kit". My system architecture efforts the last five years at a world wide IT services firm have given me insights and experiences in multiple platforms, so my opinions are based on a little more than "looking at one screen".
The Pocket PC and Smartphone is built on top of Windows CE 3.0 which is a sub set of Win32 APIs, known to millions of developers. The higher level of reuse of skill and code the better. Since Pocket PC and Smartphone application development is done using standards, tools and languages known to these developers there's a significant amount of leverage available to draw benefits from.
Let's stick to the subject and stay away from insults such as: "I wonder if I will be ever invited my MS at Seattle so I can change my idea as well....."
|
| |
|
|
|
11-08-2002, 02:12 PM
|
|
Pupil
Join Date: Mar 2002
Posts: 11
|
|
Quote:
|
Originally Posted by jizmo
I second that, Leviathan.
I'm all pro-pocket pc, but I'm also conserned about this site becoming a place that just focuses on mindlessly promoting MS products and putting down all the others.
Whilst I realise that this site *is* a opinion site, I still feel that the overall credibility is at stake here if this site is just all about that. One-sided advertising, if noticed, tends to make people reject the rest of the text and even the smart observations by the writer, which is a shame.
|
I too have to agree. I can understand that many of the editors are now MS MVPs but please do not write such blatant MS propaganda. I have been a Windows developer all my life and have realised that though not everything bad said about MS is true, it certainly is no saint and neither are its tools flawless.
I have been a regular reader for a very long time and I think it would do a lot of good to this site to continue to provide opinions and not biased 'opinions'.
|
| |
|
|
|
11-08-2002, 02:57 PM
|
|
Pupil
Join Date: Nov 2002
Posts: 19
|
|
Quote:
|
Originally Posted by Andy Sjostrom
I never thought credibility would be brought up...
cut....
Let's stick to the subject and stay away from insults such as: "I wonder if I will be ever invited my MS at Seattle so I can change my idea as well....."
|
I wasn't the one questioning your or this site credibility, but for sure there is lot more than just PocketPC bias around here. I didn't know that you have been to Seattle, a lot of people do and for sure is not an insult, maybe a secret wish of mine. I've been developing for Windows CE first then PocketPC not to mention the Windows platform that I've been programming since it was shipping bundled with certain applications, so I think even if I'm not a MVP (which, BTW do not qualifies for anything, sometime less than air miles collecting cards) I know my stuff pretty well. The fact that the same API, to say, to open a window in the desktop version of the OS is the same in the PPC do not mean anything to the vast majority of developers, developing and optimizing for a small screen with lesser memory, no keyboard etc it's something challenging even for die hard developers, so the API naming is just a small advantage. Even more, the model of the Desktop Windows API transported to PocketPC and SmartPhones it is not that appropriate. Symbian for example allows you to create threads (like WinCE) but even somwething much more powerful, the so called ActiveObjects, which allows you to work in OO manner all time without having to set callbacks, allow for event based programming (no messages) etc. There are other extremely useful things like cleanup stacks that help to keep track of unreleased memory, leakages etc which are so important to track in embedded hardware. None of these things and many other exists in the WinCE counterparts. Also, the OS eats so many cycles that the performance of a 206MHz ARM CPU running WinCE deliver the same performance of 106 Mhz ARM CPU running Symbian (this comparing a Compaq IPAQ 3630 and a Nokia 7650). What I like of PPC are the tools, which are not perfect, but show some degrees of interaction with the physical device and allow things like remote debugging, something that, at the moment, is not present in the Symbian SDK. These discussion based on "my computer is longer than yours" (replace "computer" with anything you like) reminds me when I was younger and we used to fight over the best computer being Commodore 64 or ZX Spectrum. Remember: telephones are NOT computers nor PocketPCs. This "use in your phone the software you already know [in the desktop]" is just low profile campaign. Telephones are used even and more by people that don't work with a computer and maybe don't even want to. Companies, like mine, that are not paid by a software producer to use a specific platform, just go where the market is: for desktop the clear winner is Windows and we are there, for palm devices the battle is still unclear but we prefer PocketPC for a number of reasons, for the telephones, sorry to Microsoft, better luck next time.
Cheers,
Lev
|
| |
|
|
|
|
|
Linear Mode
