A bit late, but i was planning to comment on an article (in Norwegian) from beginning of November that refere to a statement from the Gartner Symposium ITxpo 2009 conference.
Made by Gartner analyst Monica Basso that muses that the Windows Mobile OS doesn´t have a future, that Microsoft is working to slow, and that they’re not able to renew the OS according to whims and wishes of the consumers. That they will not be able to regain any market share because of that.
Basis for this is according to Gartner that the Windows Mobile platform is to big and not dynamic enough to be scaled down to function on the less powerful and not so advanced phones, aka the regular cellphones(?) that dominates today’s mobile market.
IMO she is right! Today in the current market I see her point, but if you look at the trends of mobility, are the market moving along in this way? will the “less powerful and not so advanced phones” be the dominating device 3-5 year into the future?
I don’t think so!
I think the growth of mobile services and the demands of the future mobile user is better screens, bigger screens, faster hardware and better network connectivity. For these (future) mobile devices you need advanced operating systems like Windows Mobile or Google Android. Windows Phone and Android will be the dominating platforms just because they have the developers that can build the mobile services of the future. The huge amount of Java and .NET developers around will see to that one of them, or both will be the dominating smart mobile operating systems as soon as they have sorted out the first generation app store flaws and created a simple enough business model.
Finally, to say that Windows Mobile doesn’t have a future, on the basis that phone hardware vendors “have to” customize the OS to add vendor specific drivers or UI frameworks and at the same time state that vendors like HTC tends to prefer Android because “they can” customize the OS to add vendor specific drivers or UI frameworks just doesn’t hold up.
#FAIL == Gartner
