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With the announcement of the new Microsoft Phone, there are now four significant players on the field.

It's going to be a pitched battle and the stakes are high.  We have Canadian based Research in Motion's Blackberry, Apples I-Phone, Google's Android based phone and now Microsoft's Windows Phone 7

Short term it's a feature war.  The look and feel that made the I-Phone so popular now are no longer the issues.  Others have either caught up or soon will.  What is important long term is:

• The power of the operating system.  Can it scale up?

• The portability of applications

• The number of hardware manufacturers that will build hardware to use the operating system.

• The number of applications that independent developers will put on the device that will earn them money.  (Apple has a big lead here)

• The ability of the phone to integrate with computers and appliances.

• The number of carriers that will support and push the phone.

It appears that the Blackberry, the most popular to date is playing catch-up with an operating system and look and feel.  Since they do not control any other major segment of the computer industry, they have the  most work to do. 

Google is playing a strong hand due to their financial muscle and their long term vision of integrating all applications on "The Cloud" that includes huge indexed server farms. (The Cloud is designed to push applications onto central servers where all the big data storage exists)

Microsoft, late to the game with a number of stumbles, cannot be counted out.  They rely on the operating system and their dominance of the personal computer  market.

Apple, has a great head start, but they will have to prove that their base operating system will work on other devices in the future.  Of course they can make it work, but they have always been slow to give up total control of the hardware and concentrate on portable operating systems.  Both Microsoft and Google have not cared about total control in the past.  In fact Microsoft made their fortune by making almost no hardware in the PC industry and letting others push the envelope e.g Intel, HP, Dell .....

So, it's not a near term feature war, it is a long term battle over seamless movement from application to application, games and appliances, "The Cloud" and what will be called "carry around" computing

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Wednesday, November 10, 2010