Danger Inc.

Om’s article on the Sidekick purchase by Microsoft held for me a real gem at the end, where he says that “Clearly, Microsoft needs help and Windows Mobile has been relegated to the Business segment”. What I find interesting here is that despite this claim, certainly here in the UK, Windows Mobile phones certainly appear to have a large presence. Just walk into any high street phone store, and the selection of smart phones is somewhat limited to pda-phones running the Windows Mobile OS. I’ve had one, it was perfectly usable and ActiveSync is a dream. I’m actually happy if that’s what the business segment uses.

But it’s not just that, I think that the next few years are going to hold bigger business development in store. Or at least I hope they do! The reason for this is that I, and those in my age range that I’d like to term ‘my generation’, have grown up around technology – more specifically very user friendly consumer technology. My generation expects a good GUI, help and support, good compatibility; but at the same time we have a certain arrogance about us when it comes to things like instruction manuals. We have a basic underlying understanding of technology based on our growth around these devices developping with us. The average ‘young person’ has their own mobile phone, their own computer (or regular access to one), an mp3 player, and after that it depends on lifestyle as to what other gadgets they might have. When this age band hits the job market properly, I think we’re all going to get a shock at how backwoods and out-dated these working business systems are, and I look forward to how demanding we are and how much pushing we provide to development of business back ends.

I just hope that efficiency always remains really close to the absolute top of every firms’ strategy and operations, and that rounding the corners off and smoothing the edges on systems isn’t something that creates a conflict of interest against this efficiency drive.

The first comment posted, from Curtis, has an excellent and obvious point. Microsoft must have been grumbling throughout the release of the iPhone and subsequent handsets that followed that tried to clone some of its features. I reckon we’ll see Windows Mobile landing comfortably on a Danger device, thus combining killer hardware with a very smooth desktop experience. Hopefully, the full functionality of a Vista/XP desktop will be available through one of these such devices.

In a way I’m kind of sad. My friend made the excellent point  that Microsoft seem to suck at innovation. From Day 1 they have been keeping an incredibly close eye on Apple and copying lots of their innovations and new features. Now we see that instead of innovating their own device to compete head on with the iPhone, they buy out a pretty excellent pre-existing company and all their products.