How Microsoft Should Compete Against the iPhone

I love my iPhone! That’s actu­ally prob­a­bly an under­state­ment. Life before my� iPhone is a blur. My day revolves around the infor­ma­tion stored on my iPhone. The iPhone is leaps and bounds above the com­pe­ti­tion and this is begin­ning to prove to be a prob­lem. The recent deba­cle with the� Google Voice app is proof of this.� Apple needs seri­ous com­pe­ti­tion in order to force it to change its Dra­con­ian ways and push it for­ward. Thus far the Android plat­form has not done this very effec­tively although the new� HTC Hero may change this.

So why do I think� Microsoft should attempt this? Amaz­ingly enough I am a fan of Microsoft. They have made some poor choices and at times lost vision but they have some VERY smart devel­op­ers and have the resources to make a take a stand and com­pete head to head with Apple in the mobile space. Microsoft owns the tech­nolo­gies today to build an out­stand­ing device that can com­pete in two main markets.

Busi­ness
Microsoft owns the busi­ness world. In most com­pa­nies when you get an email its read in� Out­look. The attach­ment is most likely a� Word or� Excel file. A phone which inte­grated which had the seam­less user expe­ri­ence of the iPhone and inte­grated with your busi­ness would be a huge seller. Apple is actively work­ing to this end but Microsoft has the upper hand since they own the prod­ucts. Microsoft needs to build a phone that seam­lessly inte­grates into their vision of� uni­fied mes­sag­ing which is already being rolled out through� Exchange server and many� PBX/VOIP systems.

Gamers / Anti-Apple
Seri­ous gamers are� Win­dows peo­ple. Why not cre­ate a phone that extends the gam­ing expe­ri­ence of the� XBOX or Gam­ing PC to a mobile device. Allow game pro­files to be stored trans­par­ently by the device allow­ing for porta­bil­ity with­out any effort. Allow game devel­op­ers to build games which make use of both plat­forms for an immer­sive expe­ri­ence. Then there peo­ple who hate Apple. Give these peo­ple the same great expe­ri­ence that Apple is sell­ing. This is a whole mar­ket of peo­ple who are look­ing for an alter­na­tive. They should also con­sider� Linux users. Microsoft needs to also sup­port open stan­dards which allows them to inte­grate with Linux sys­tems. Don’t limit it from any­one even if Microsoft prod­ucts by design may inte­grate with less effort, allow it to inte­grate with other systems.

So now to the nitty gritty, Microsoft needs to start a “Man­hat­tan Project” using their most tal­ented resources to build this device. The fol­low­ing are a brief run­down of how I think they should do it.

Legacy Win­dows Mobile
The first step is aban­don­ing sup­port for the legacy sys­tem. Microsoft needs to estab­lish a 5–7 year plan for dis­con­tin­u­ing the old� Win­dows Mobile OS. This tran­si­tion needs to be a clean slate effort

Part­ners
Microsoft has made its liv­ing on design­ing soft­ware that part­ners can use in their devices and I think this should remain but there needs to be a very strict cer­ti­fi­ca­tion process and Microsoft needs to build a ref­er­ence device. That device is what this arti­cle describes.

Hard­ware
The� Zune HD is proof that Microsoft can make a beau­ti­ful hard­ware device. The device should have grace and ele­gance, with­out the super­flu­ous but­tons that plague most WinMo devices and a build qual­ity unpar­al­leled by any other device. These phones are sold on two year com­mit­ments they need to be built to last (while this may be counter to indus­try stan­dards a con­sumer can rec­og­nize and appre­ci­ate this).

UI
This is where Microsoft keeps get­ting them­selves in trou­ble. Win­dows Mobile tried to tie the desk­top UI par­a­digm to a mobile device. Even going so far as includ­ing a� “Start” menu. The UI needs to be designed specif­i­cally for a small device to be used by touch. This is where Microsoft needs to pull the Zune team in. They should design an inter­face that is clean, intu­itive, visu­ally appeal­ing and gives clear visual cues to the cur­rent state of the device. One of the orogi­nal ideas behind the� Palm Pilot was atten­tion to the num­ber of “taps” it took to get to any func­tion. The UI design needs to take this into account and strive to cut­down on super­flous drill downs (ex. No drop down menus that open explor­ers that allow you to click fold­ers to get to files).

OS
They need to focus on the fol­low­ing areas:

• Sta­bil­ity: As a phone it has to have 100% uptime.
• Low power con­sump­tion: The OS needs to be smart enough to shut­off unused areas of the chipset.
• Multi task­ing: This is some­thing Apple has steered clear of. Microsoft needs to inves­ti­gare strate­gies for mak­ing this doable. What we don’t want how­ever is the a return to the days where you had to man­u­ally kill process in order to free up memory.
• Mod­u­lar: A core OS which can have other sub­sys­tems built on top. This would allow for mul­ti­ple devices (ex. Phones, Music Play­ers, Tablets, Alarm Clocks) to use a com­mon OS but not require the extra pay­loads if they are not needed. This OS needs to be viewed as Microsoft’s non desk­top OS strategy.
• Speed: This OS needs to be fast. I may miss that photo if the cam­era takes for­ever to start.

Busi­ness Needs
The phone needs seam­less con­nec­tiv­ity to cor­po­rate� VPNs, email sys­tems, IM sys­tems and full Word and Excel edit­ing. It should be an exten­sion of your office and the con­nec­tion should be transparent.

Cus­tom Appli­ca­tion Devel­op­ment / App Store
This is where Microsoft can really shine. The .NET plat­form is one of the best devel­op­ment plat­forms in the world. I am a� C# devel­oper and I love it! � Visual Stu­dio is very full fea­tured the syn­tax is intu­itive and best of all there are a LOT of .NET devel­op­ers just like me all over the world. If Microsoft makes .NET sing on the new phone and they cre­ate an intu­itive set of APIs then you have a huge pool of devel­op­ers who can imme­di­ately begin crank­ing out apps. This is the real key. If devel­op­ers see it easy to  build and pro­mote their apps then they will grav­i­tate to it.

Gam­ing
Gam­ing is an area which Microsoft has done well. A few years ago they released a devel­op­ment plat­form called� XNA which allowed games to be built with C#. This effort need to be expanded upon to include mobile. A uni­fied app store could be built where a gamer could pur­chase a game and play it on the� XBOX in “expanded mode” or on the mobile device. Sud­denly game devel­op­ers and even non-game C# devel­op­ers have a com­pelling rea­son to choose Microsoft when they are design­ing a game. Game devel­op­ers for the “write once / run many” aspect and non-game devel­op­ers for the lower learn­ing curve. This would posi­tion Microsoft as the defin­i­tive king of gaming.

Music
Microsoft already has the� Zune and the� Zune Pass store so mak­ing a killer music phone would not be dif­fi­cult. Hav­ing direct down­load of Zune Pass on the phone makes it a no brainer for music lovers since your music library is vir­tu­ally unlimited.

Video
1080P video capa­bil­ity and an on demand video store can make this phone a portable� media cen­ter. Videos recorded on your� Media Cen­ter PC are auto­mat­i­cally made avail­ble to your phone just like a Sling­box so you can watch them anywhere.

Sync­ing
Sync­ing should be com­pletely trans­par­ent. I should never have to think about sync­ing. It should take place as a com­bi­na­tion of WiFi and cloud sync­ing. WiFi for large files and music and cloud for every­thing else.

Social
While I don’t think the phone should be tied to spe­cific social net­works, cer­tain� APIs should be made avail­able to easy retrieve phone infor­ma­tion (ex. Cal­en­dar, Con­tacts) so that plu­g­ins can be writ­ten to sync this information.

Other
Over­all the whole con­cept of the mobile device should be reviewed. I think the idea of “file struc­ture” should be aban­doned on this device. Data should be stored using� SQL Server tech­nol­ogy and be shared with other apps on the phone so apps can build on the com­mon ground. This is sim­i­lar to the “soup” con­cept in the� Apple New­ton

Ulti­mately I want to see a phone that will help drive the indus­try for­ward and in turn drive itself forward.