Microsoft’s mobile limbo

Spurred on by the stellar success of iPhone’s App Store, developers working with other mobile platforms are pressuring vendors to pave their way to become millionaires, $2.99 (BUY NOW BEFORE PRICE GOES UP!) at a time. It’s odd to see the leader in desktop client software, Microsoft, lagging the rest of the industry in the mobile app revolution, but that’s where it’s stuck.

Windows Mobile doesn’t lend itself to seat-of-the-pants development of user-facing apps the way that iPhone, HTML 5, and Flash Lite do. With iPhone, Android, webOS, and Flash Lite, developers can park themselves in front of an integrated development environment with nothing but a good (by someone’s standards) idea and let things grow from there. What starts out as a UI prototype can end up evolving, through short steps, into a rich, finished application. Where that spark of inspiration flourishes best and most readily manifests as working code, the greatest number and diversity of mobile apps is found.

So what makes the spark catch fire, and why is Windows Mobile seemingly damper ground than elsewhere? It’s generally accepted that a developer is most productive and creative in the toolset that he or she knows best, whether that’s Eclipse, Xcode, Dashcode, Komodo, or Creative Suite 4, but mobile skews that equation a bit. No toolset boasts as many expert users as Visual Studio. Microsoft must be mystified at the failure of crossover advantage playing a major role. Windows app developers, Microsoft MVPs, eschewing Windows Mobile in favor of iPhone and Android?

The trouble with Windows Mobile

The fact is, Visual Studio developers would learn to code in Martian to get their apps to iPhone (rumors that Objective-C is rooted in this dialect are unfounded), and Java coders happily racked up new skills to come to Android. In mobile, it’s not all about the tools. It’s about the user experience, and that includes the feeling a developer gets the first time their new app uploads to an actual device and runs successfully. Either they get goosebumps, call everyone they know, and shoot a YouTube video of their new baby, or they say “thank God” and start doing the code-behind for the buttons. Mobile development should be exhilarating. When it is, you get tons of apps.

It comes across sounding completely trivial, especially in a venue like InfoWorld that caters to professionals and enterprises, but Windows Mobile’s greatest failing is its slow, dated, yet perfectly functional UI. Windows Mobile doesn’t tantalize with the opportunity to ratchet up an app’s information density by adding motion, or ratchet down operating difficulty by making everything fingertip-friendly. My stuffed shirt executive side says that such gewgaws are unnecessary distractions in serious applications. My frosted side says that everyone, stuffed shirts included, gravitates toward solutions that they enjoy using and that creators enjoyed creating.

Windows Mobile handset maker HTC got so tired of getting creamed in side-by-side, in-store demos against, well, everything else that it shoved Microsoft’s Today screen aside in favor of its own. Then it did its own app launcher, followed by an address book and a streaming video player, and I have no doubt that a whole cadre of HTC developers is working now on burying Windows Mobile’s interface under much slicker, much quicker touch UIs that are completely unrecognizable as Windows. Whenever HTC’s scrim pulls back to reveal vanilla Windows Mobile, it feels as if your device has downshifted to first gear and 1996.

If HTC packaged its UI goodies as a software development kit, it could put any price it likes on them. But really, even keeping the weary Windows look and feel and just adding headroom in UI responsiveness would open the doors to classes of applications that would spark sales and developer enthusiasm. Only new applications will help the platform take hold among those sought-after young buyers, and the misclassified non-young like me who just aren’t nostalgic for a portable Windows for Workgroups in an era where mobile GUIs that run at video game speed, or at least at Safari speed, set the standard. For Pete’s sake, Microsoft, even BlackBerry has caught up, and if anyone could get away with staying boring because nobody’s complaining, it’s RIM.

That’s right. Windows Mobile users have no complaints (except, now, with me). Tons of device choice and a mature suite of dev tools make it a popular platform for custom corporate apps, and people who want half of the function of a notebook clipped to their belts are well served. So is it fair to hold Microsoft to a standard as shallow as, let’s face it, “cool”?

Silver lining

Don’t look at me. Blame the market. Companies and organizations that let workers choose their own devices issue standards for connectivity that several mobile platforms can satisfy. Generally, if it talks to Exchange Server and can open Office attachments, it’s jake with IT. More and more, people carry what they want to, not what they’re ordered to, so mobile ISVs and developers that hope to succeed have to move with the installed base.

It is possible, however, for Microsoft to beckon the installed base, and developers with it, back in its direction. Microsoft’s salvation may come in the form of near-mythical Silverlight Mobile, which promised a Q1 ’09 public debut but has become the product about which Microsoft execs are most likely to respond by backing out of the room saying “great question, gotta run, get back to you” when queried. Silverlight is brilliant stuff on the desktop, a real kitchen sink of Microsoft’s best tech, and it’d be the shortest path yet to making rich, connected apps portable from Windows (and Mac!) to anything handheld. It could transform the Windows Mobile platform overnight into something that wins against iPhone and Android, and there are thousands of Visual Studio and Silverlight developers sitting on the starting line, gunning their engines.

The difficulty, I imagine, is that Silverlight’s an embarrassment without accelerated graphics. Microsoft wouldn’t want to release a downloadable Silverlight Mobile beta that one of those sought-after youthful buyers with a $600 (list) handset and his own blog might damn by praising as “pretty, but slow.”

It’s a 30-frame-per-second world.

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