I read an interesting post over at PocketNow in which Chuong Nguyen looks at the likelihood of the new iPhone OS4 starting a fragmentation of the iPhone market. I say ‘Yay!’
Since iPhone OS3-and-under iPhones and iPod Touches won’t be upgradeable to iPhone OS4, Apple will inevitably end up with iPhone users wanting to run apps their devices don’t support, and possibly unable to re-install their OS or legacy apps after a crash or a hard reset. Chuong goes on to compare this to the fragmentation troubles that Android now finds itself facing and from which Windows Mobile has long suffered.
He correctly points out that the schism in Apple’s case comes from a software update, not hardware differences. In Android-land, the fragmentation comes not only by way of software updates (from both Google and the open-source community) but also from hardware differences between devices, like strange screen resolutions, differing CPUs, GPUs and form factors, touchscreen/not touchscreen, etc.
And Microsoft?
Microsoft was a victim of its own moderate early success. Back when it was Palm and Windows Mobile ruling the early, pre-iPhone, PDA/smarphone show, Microsoft got locked into supporting the thousands and thousands of apps that were written for the platform. Massive enterprises adopted Windows Mobile solutions and professional, corporate and enterprise software was written and distributed to millions of users… whom Microsoft could not abandon.
Yes, yes, they also suffer from the same troubles as Android with differing OS versions and wacky hardware out there, but all of that was manageable for a veteran OS company like Microsoft (more later).
In fact, I really feel for poor Microsoft! I remember my first WinMo device – a UT Starcom PPC6700 running Windows Mobile 5: my buddy Crabtree dubbed it “the pocket instrument of mass destruction”, and I was just blown away by what it could do – with a little persuasion – and by how little it couldn’t do. That was in the spring of 2005, and I’m so sad that 5 years later I’ve still got something almost identical in my pocket! Why?
Dang legacy users! What do you do with your legacy users!?
So while Apple and Google waltzed in late to the party with their killer mobile OSes – so nice and finely tuned thanks to the lessons learned through the early travails of Palm, Microsoft, Compaq and others – Microsoft was still trying to figure out what to do with their legacy users.
Well, after 5 years of thought, deliberation, study, the multi-year Project Pink and the massive consumer research project that started before it, Muse, the purchase of Danger and their SideKick device… and Microsoft has finally came up with their answer to legacy users: dump them!
By biting the bullet and committing to no backwards compatibility in Windows Phone 7, Microsoft positions itself pretty nicely for this next round of the smartphone wars, as Microsoft is very familiar with supporting multiple OSes on a wide variety of hardware. With the introduction of the Kin line of devices this week, Microsoft now has three mobile lines going:
- Windows Phone 7,
- Windows Phone Classic (Windows Mobile 6.5x), and
- Kin (essentially the new, bottom-of-the-line dumb phones of the future)
This is a very manageable plate for Microsoft. The Kin are no-brainers, nothing to support there. Windows Phone Classic, still building on CE (despite its well-justified critics) is a pretty mature OS and Microsoft continues to fine-tune it.
Perhaps most importantly – and annoyingly for us fanboys – Windows Phone 7 devices will be the only smartphones that don’t support natively written apps, which means Microsoft won’t get caught in this legacy user situation again. Apple and Google, meanwhile, will be facing this challenge for some time to come!
Grin ;)
Welcome to the Legacy-User club, Apple! We ‘Softies call it the L-User Club! Oh, you too, Google!
