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View Full Version : Has Microsoft got it's Mobile strategy wrong???


palewar
11-26-2007, 04:22 PM
We are a Microsoft shop primarily and we do mobile applications targeting Windows Mobile OS, and we may continue to be a Microsoft technologies company in future too owing to mass popularity Microsoft manages to acquire due to various reasons.

However I simply hate the fact that MS keeps adding layers and layers of complication to all its products, making softwares bloated, complicated, frustrating and slow. There has been enough bashing of Windows Vista as well as Windows Mobile 6 (http://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/08/technology/personaltech/08pogue.html). I have read them and been silent all this while, however when I read about Slide-Show making its way to windows mobile (http://www.tvsquad.com/2007/11/23/windows-vista-sideshow-coming-to-windows-mobile/), I simply could not resist writing this post.

Mobiles are meant to start immediately on press of power button, while desktops are not, so I don't think slide-show is a requirement on mobiles at all. You can just push the power-on button on mobile and press a pre-assigned key to start your favourite application. Why you need an always on and smaller display for it???

I think MS has got its strategy wrong here. Its again trying to make mobiles do whatever a desktop can, which I think is not a clever idea.

Also I guess that in future MS will use Slideshow as an excuse for slow windows mobile powered phones. With all the features it is putting in windows mobile, its going to gradually become slower and slower even with faster processors, so MS will say - use Slide-show for features which you want to perform immediately ;-)

I think Slide-show adds another layer to complicated user-interface and makes users much more confused. In my opinion its a very bad idea.

Russ Smith
12-02-2007, 01:00 AM
I thought this meant that Windows Mobile devices could act as a Sideshow display for a desktop, not that they were gaining some sort of Sideshow server capabilities. I can see the usefulness of the former but would agree with you on the later.

A PDA is useful, in spite of the stripped-down applications, small memory model, and small screen because you can get at your data anywhere, quickly, with instant-on. UMPCs are useful (to some) because, in spite of their time-to-start-up, they run desktop software, with all it's features. (Take presentations, for instance.) I suspect that sometime in the future we'll have ultra-long-life batteries and powerful, yet tiny processors that might allow the two to merge (If you can stay on Standby all day, it's essentially instant-on.), but until then it just gets annoying to try to use a UMPC for a PDA or vice-versa.

However, Microsoft's strategy has always been trying to pack as much capability into Windows Mobile as possible. They started with a multi-tasking OS with the idea that that the hardware would "catch-up" to the software. Microsoft's strategy is the main reason I went with Pocket PC instead of a Palm (and the reason I stayed with it).

I think the strategy is mostly right-headed, although there are some examples of "feature creep" that make me scratch my head too.

Sven Johannsen
12-02-2007, 04:10 AM
I agree with Russ. The Sideshow (not Slideshow) capability suggested is to use the WM device as a secondary display for the desktop or laptop. Sideshow is intended to provide a useful display for laptops in a way similar to the external display on a flip-phone. You would have an area of flash ROM in a laptop, that an external display could access to provide some info like appointments, battery level, maybe alarms, all accessible without booting the laptop.

Kind of a cute idea to allow WM to serve as such a display, and that has even been done before. Previously there have been some third party programs that have allowed a PPC to act as a second display, and you could drag an IM window or WMP controls to it. Made sense when PPCs sat in cradles on the desk next to a PC. SideShow capability would sort of legitimize/formalize that with gadgets developed specifically for that. Can't see that it would ever be much use for the scenario where I am at the airport and want to look at the flight numbers and times from Outlook on my laptop. A sideshow screen on the laptop would serve that function...I can't see the WM device accessing it...I would expect it would already have it on its own in any case. One application that does make some sense to me is a Sideshow gadget in WM to control Media Center under Vista. Over BT, that could make a real nice little remote for the media center. Imagine if you could scroll through the TV listing while watching something.

BTW a secondary display capability already exist in Windows Mobile. My SmartFlip has a perfectly usable external display already. It is probably not often noticed as there are so few flip format WM phones.

palewar
12-03-2007, 02:38 PM
Sorry guys I meant SideShow only which I typed as SlideShow. Thanks sven. I think if Sideshow is used as a secondary/external display on flip-format (Clamshell form factor) phones, then it may be a useful feature to an extent but then it will be totally useless feature on other form factors like candy bar.

And if its to be used as secondary display for laptops/desktops then why we need a separate jargon and SDK for it. Such applications still exist and can still be created using BT and other connectivity options.

I think its confusing. MS has always confused users with strange names which it keeps changing with each version.

Some example of its earlier flip-flop with names is - SQL CE - SQL Mobile -SQL Everywhere and recently Classic, Professional and Standard editions of Windows Mobile. I bet that these windows mobile edition names are also not going to last more than 2-3 years and we will need to update our knowledge once again when MS's technical team gets another creativity surge.

Sven Johannsen
12-04-2007, 06:04 AM
And if its to be used as secondary display for laptops/desktops then why we need a separate jargon and SDK for it. Such applications still exist and can still be created using BT and other connectivity options. Because the capability doesn't exist at this point. At least not as a MS supported/developed capability.

While often MS providing a 'new' capability stagnates creativity from third parties, it can also legitimize and standardize the capability. Take landscape displays for example. There were a number of third party offerrings that provided that before MS included it on the OS in WM2003SE, but they were a bit buggy and not guaranteed to support all apps. When it became an OS feature, we lost some stuff like zooming, but we got a consistant implementation across all apps.

MS developing a camera API, I would guess had similar impacts. If the hardware manufacturers complied with the guidlines and used the API construct to drive their cameras, it should make third party software access to camera features easier to create. An ISV wouldn't have to support every camera implementation, just the API calls.

With SideShow as a standard WM feature, we should be able to take advantage of anything that is coded for Sidehow on the desktop, without the programmer needing to worry about if his app is going to run on the outside of a laptop or on a WM device tethered to a PC.