Comment Articles

Why didn't mobile platforms trip Microsoft up?

Peter Judge ZDNet.co.uk

Published: 04 Jul 2002 11:55 BST

A couple of years ago, we all thought that Microsoft really had it coming. The monopoly that gave it its power was on shaky grounds. Looking back, I wonder how we could be so naive.

The antitrust case was going, and Microsoft would no longer be able to exploit its effective monopoly on desktop operating systems, we thought. But more importantly, there was an even bigger threat coming up which would make that monopoly simply irrelevant: mobile devices.

Microsoft's power was based on the vast number of people who used Windows, which focused developer effort on that platform, commentators used to say. However, there was a wave of diverse devices coming, including WAP phones, various thin clients, PDAs and more. Microsoft would never be able to keep a coherent grip on them all, Windows would fragment, and opportunity would knock for its would-be rivals.

There were some good reasons why we expected this to happen. Microsoft's WebTV had been a dismal failure. So had the Microsoft at Work initiative, which tried to put Windows on fax machines and printers and was so cruddy it was known as "Windows for Toasters". Windows CE looked as if it would never seriously compete with PalmOS.

Even within the more or less successful branches of the Windows family, significant differences were emerging -- Windows NT, Windows 98 and Windows CE were different products; they had different APIs. For every new platform, Microsoft would have to create a new version of Windows -- and that would be a killer (or so we thought).

Every time Microsoft decided to put Windows on a new type of system, it would have to understand that kind of product, and the market it served. It would have to create software that used the unfamiliar hardware to provide Windows features (as far as they could be supported). It would have to encourage third parties to put applications on that platform. And it would have to displace whatever existed on that system already.

All this would be some task since, for example, Windows on a phone would look so different to Windows on a big screen that the application developer would have to produce and maintain two completely different versions of the application. Why would it bother to do that if, for example, Symbian evolved into a better operating system for phones and PDAs?