Kenny Hemphill
Contrary to what Microsoft’s Ray Ozzie believes, apps are the way forward for the smartphone market, so Apple must get its approval process sorted.
Ray Ozzie, Microsoft’s chief software architect, recently told attendees at the company’s Professional Developer Conference that applications won’t be important on smartphones soon because ‘all the apps that count’ will be available on every smartphone. Instead, he said it was the operating system itself and the built-in functionality that will count.
His point was that phone applications are much smaller and less complex than desktop applications, which means the time to write and port code is shorter, thus making it easier and less expensive to write for every platform.
Ozzie’s comments were widely seen as an attempt to downplay the catastrophic way in which Microsoft has dropped the ball in the mobile devices market. Once the undisputed leader, Windows Mobile now faces stiff competition from Apple, Google and Palm. If anything, though, his remarks highlighted how much Microsoft still has to learn about the market for mobile devices.
There’s a great deal more to levelling the playing field with respect to third-party applications than making it relatively easy for developers to write them. As Apple has shown with its disastrous approval process, balancing the interests of customers and developers with those of the data networks in a way that makes sense isn’t exactly what you could call straightforward.
In Apple’s case, it would appear that it has been unable to either come up with a set of guidelines for approval that make any sort of logical sense, or that it has failed to communicate its policy to those responsible for accepting or rejecting applications. Whatever it is that has gone wrong, it has already driven two high-profile developers away from the iPhone platform, and more could follow suit.
That a company that has done such a great job of building and marketing a new smartphone platform could get it so wrong should be a stark warning to others, especially Microsoft, which hardly has a glittering recent history when it comes to selling mobile devices.
Remember the Zune? That was Microsoft’s personal media player that was going to break the iPod’s stranglehold on the market. Its key feature, or unique selling point in marketing speak, was its ability to let users beam songs to each other. The latest version is the Zune HD. It doesn’t have a Hard Drive. And its screen isn’t High Definition. It does, however receive HD radio in the US and can store 720p HD movies so you can play them back on a larger screen. Just what you want from a personal media player. That’s an indication of how much Microsoft has lost touch with the market for mobile devices.
At a time when it should be putting everything into improving its share of the fast-growing smartphone market by building on the foundations laid by Windows Mobile, it’s marketing personal media players that are designed to be connected to HDTVs and talking about adding Zune features to the next version of Mobile. And at a time when it should be chastened by the way it’s being threatened by Apple, Palm, Google and Rim, it’s instead denouncing the market for third-party apps, which many see as being crucial to the popularity of the iPhone, as irrelevant.
Perhaps the clue to Microsoft’s view of third party apps is in Ozzie’s phrase ‘all the apps that count’. If those apps are the ones that allow us to talk, send texts, access the Internet, exchange email, look up contacts and check calendars, then he’s right, they’ll all be available on all platforms. And, yes, big developers will develop for all platforms.
However, one of the key things that makes the iPhone so popular is the thousands of independent developers who produce wonderful applications that perform tasks that many of us never dreamed of doing on a phone in a way that makes them a joy to use.
Many of those developers have been writing for the Mac OS for years and have formed a bond with the platform and with each other. It’s them and the apps they write who will make the difference. That’s why Apple has spent so much money advertising iPhone apps on TV. It understands how we use the iPhone and what it will take to keep us upgrading year after year.
Sadly, it doesn’t yet seem to understand how to communicate effectively with developers, or even with its approval team. That approval system needs an overhaul, and quickly. Then Apple can demonstrate to Microsoft just why third-party apps are so important to every smartphone platform.
