Why We Stick With iPhone

As John Gruber points out, Windows Mobile 6.5 has launched to the disdain of nearly every reviewer.  We stand among those ranks.  Like every mobile platform, we have examined Windows Mobile carefully to determine whether it might be a fruitful development platform for us. The answer remains no.

Windows Mobile 6.5 demonstrates all too well the confusion that Microsoft has brought to the mobile landscape.  Their Zune HD recently launched to much fanfare and was hailed by many of the same reviewers rejecting WM6.5 today as a great leap forward in terms of design and function. Yet the Zune team was sequestered from the cell phone market, and even applications for the Zune HD have been largely stifled.  Meanwhile, Microsoft is working on their “Pink” phone project, still veiled in mystery, and continues to support the Sidekick platform, which was developed by Danger, a company Microsoft bought last February.

Why does any company, even one the size of Microsoft, need to build four completely separate mobile platforms? This has been, and remains, a strategy of rival divisions trying to outdo themselves and justify their individual existence while hurting the organization as a whole. We believe that this is the result of a lack of leadership and a clear focus from the top: this is what happens when a company the size of Microsoft tries simply to compete with everyone else rather than create a true standard of their own.

The screen shown to the left goes quite a distance toward explaining the woes of WM6.5 overall. We see a screen that staggers the columns familiar to iPhone users vertically in order to provide some sort of visual differentiation from Apple’s product. But the staggering creates a confused look and doesn’t prioritize which features users use most often well. The Phone icon is almost lost in the middle of the screen; any color but blue would have helped it stand out when compared to its icon neighbors (Contacts, IE, and the left side of the Text icon).  

The fact that there’s a “Getting Started” menu at all should have raised concerns at Microsoft. Why is a tutorial program necessary? Why isn’t the interface self-evident? If a tutorial is required, chances are that the UI is not yet as good as it should be.

Even more perplexing, users apparently arrive at this screen via the Start button, instead of seeing the drop-down menu that users have known as The Only Way on Windows platforms for fifteen years. Meanwhile, users taken to a completely different, and very Zune-reminiscent, screen if they press the “Today” button. The “Today” screen offers all of these same options in a completely different way. Among the other issues: Internet Explorer remains horrible and the on-screen keyboard apparently borders on unusable, requiring a stylus for any accuracy.

We’re hopeful about the future of Android and think that Palm’s WebOS holds some promise, as well. RIM’s Blackberry family is simply too segmented for our tastes; there are plenty of Blackberries out there, but the different OS versions and carrier-based App Stores create a scenario where developing one app means developing several very different versions.  But Microsoft’s platforms are simply dreadful. The level of corporate confusion that’s easy for the casual observer to see speaks badly to Microsoft’s ability to ever compete in the mobile sector. And that’s a shame, because the Zune HD proves that there are designers and engineers at Microsoft that are capable of producing a quality platform. In chasing Apple, Microsoft has instead fallen further behind. A unified and focused development platform is the key to success in today’s mobile environment, and Apple remains the only company to truly deliver this thus far.

Images Courtesy Gizmodo