Can Windows Mobile Get the Magic Back?

Can Windows Mobile Get the Magic Back?

By Saul Hansell
The New York Times
January 22, 2009, 1:17 pm

“Automagicly” is a word that Andrew Lees seems to use a great deal more than most people.

Mr. Lees, the senior vice president in charge of Microsoft’s cellphone software, stopped by recently to drop hints about what will be in the next generation of Windows Mobile that will be introduced at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona next month.

Since taking over the phone group a year ago, Mr. Lees said that the company has started to build features for entertainment and personal use (translation: more like the iPhone). Until then, Windows Mobile mainly was aimed at business users with technology meant to endear itself to corporate information managers.

“Everyone who is a business person is also a human being,” he said. “We want also to do human things like photos, music, communications, IM, texting and social networking.”

Mr. Lees echoed what other Microsoft executives keeps saying in many areas, what human beings want is for their phones to talk nicely to their computers, television sets and Web services.

For example, he talks about taking pictures with a camera phone. Mr. Lees points out that lots of people can’t figure out how to get their photos off their phones.

“What should happen,” he said, “is when you take a picture it should automagically arrive on your PC and be in the cloud. I should be able to fix the red eye on the PC and have it automagically go back and fix the red eye everywhere else.”

Similarly, he said the phone should automatically know your friends, by way of links to social networking services, send them the photo and collect comments about it.

There will be no separate “Windows Automagic” service to buy, analogous to Apple’s $99 a year MobileMe cloud computing service. Rather, most of the synchronization will be a part of using Windows, Windows Mobile, and the Windows Live Web services. Mostly the services are free, but there will be some premium offerings, he said.

“I don’t think anyone is going to make money on synchronizing data,” he said. “It is simply what people will come to expect.”

Indeed, Mr. Lees said he is not at all sure that the Windows Mobile unit will make much money from the advertising or fees that are associated with these services. His business plan is counting on making a profit simply from charging a license fee for Windows software to handset makers. (He wouldn’t say what the fee is, but he said my guess of high single digit dollars to low double digit dollars was in the ballpark.)

Wireless carriers, he added, may add their own variations onto these services to create products to sell to their customers.

Of course, there just might be someone who has a Windows computer and may even like Windows Live Web services who doesn’t want a Windows Mobile phone. They are mostly out of luck, Mr. Lees said, because the company isn’t spending much time developing applications that will do all this “automagic” stuff on other phone platforms. (There will be some Windows live services available through cellphone Web browsers.)

With so much interest among handset makers about Google’s Android, which is free, I asked Mr. Lees why a company would want to pay for Windows Mobile.

Here too, his answer was the automagic, er automatic. He argued that phone makers will want to deliver products that include services that connect information to the Web and other devices. The open source operating systems, like Android and Symbian, don’t include as rich a set of services as Windows Mobile, he argued.

“They are going to look around at what their options are and say ‘Is open source going to do all the things I need to do to compete with Windows Mobile?’” he said. “Is it going to create the social experience, the e-mail experience and all the other experiences people want?”

If in fact the new version of Windows Mobile and all the associated services do make Microsoft the company people want to beat in the cellphone market, Andy Lees will be an automagician indeed.


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(MS is obviously making a publicity push. Here's the CNET article on CNN.)


Microsoft aiming to recover lost ground in mobile

By Ina Fried
CNET.com

(CNET) -- Microsoft has made some stumbles in the mobile world, but a strategy shift made more than a year ago will soon pay dividends, the company's top Windows Mobile executive said in an interview with CNET News.

Andy Lees, the executive brought over from the server unit a year ago, said that Microsoft's efforts to make sure that its mobile software could run on a wide range of phones resulted in an operating system that failed to take advantage of advances in hardware.

"We aimed to go for a lower common denominator," Lees said. Microsoft was also limited by the origins of Windows Mobile, which was developed to power handheld computers that neither connected to a network nor handled voice.

"We started out when we were in PDAs (personal digital assistants) and then a phone got strapped to the back of the PDA," Lees said. The company also failed to recognize that phones--even those that were used for business--were still as much personal as they were professional.

Meanwhile, Apple and Google have joined the fray with operating systems designed from the ground up to take advantage of the latest in phone technology.

But Lees said that Microsoft embarked on a new strategy some time ago that will come to fruition over the next 18 months. The first steps in that strategy, he said, will be announced at the Mobile World Congress conference that takes place in Barcelona in the middle of next month.

"You are going to see a bunch of announcements at Mobile World Congress but also it is going to be the beginning of a 12-, 18-month period where you are going to see a whole bunch of different stuff," Lees said.

Part of Microsoft's new strategy, Lees said, is not relying on operating system upgrades to improve its products. The new approach, while still making money by selling a mobile operating system, places considerable focus on services that help connect the phone to the PC and Web as well as devices such as the Xbox.

Microsoft has two separate teams at work on the services piece. One is Microsoft's Windows Live group, while the other is a rather secretive group headed by former Mac unit head Roz Ho--a group that also includes the team Microsoft acquired when it bought Danger. Lees declined to say specifically what Ho is up to, however.

But Lees acknowledged the company also needs to improve that core operating system, which is widely seen as lagging that of most of its rivals.

For some time now, Microsoft has been working on a significant overhaul of its operating system, known as Windows Mobile 7. However, that project has hit delays, prompting Microsoft to push forward with an interim update, Windows Mobile 6.5, which the company is widely expected to detail next month. Lees declined to comment specifically on either version of the operating system, but promised the company would have more to say on the OS front in Barcelona.

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