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July 05, 2004
Microsoft, Rock, Hard Place
Posted by Dana Blankenhorn
One byproduct of The Register's business model (see below) is it provides an excellent platform for newsletter publishers seeking subscription income.
Here's an example. Wireless Watch, from Rethink Research, has posted a thought-provoking commentary on Microsoft's challenge in the cellular business. (Microsoft's play is Windows CE. You can buy the developers' overview to the right from Amazon.Com.)
Microsoft faces two big challenges here -- Java and open source. While Qualcomm controls Verizon Wireless, Sun's Java is the lingua franca everywhere else, and if Verizon cares about the cellular data market it will, in time, conform.
Wireless Watch notes that Microsoft has tried to open its Windows CE a bit, but now it's going further. While the software still costs, $995 plus $3 per device, developers no longer have to give their innovations back to Microsoft royalty-free. Microsoft is letting CE developers see 2.5 million lines of source code, including the kernel, graphical user interface, file system, device drivers, and web server.
But in making these moves Microsoft is merely following, and several paces behind, the Linux movement, where this kind of detail is available as a matter of course. And Java, the market leader today, is moving toward an open source model as well.
Remember, within a few years more Web servers will run on cell phones than on anything else. This is where the market is moving. And it's moving away from Microsoft.
That's news.
Comments (1)
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Dana Blankenhorn has been a business journalist for over 25 years and has covered the online world professionally since 1985. He founded the "Interactive Age Daily" for CMP Media, and has written for the Chicago Tribune, Advertising Age, and dozens of other publications over the years.
1. Shawn on July 5, 2004 01:21 PM writes...
There's no doubt that Microsoft has the deck stacked against them right now when it comes to the cellular market. Success never really comes down to one single thing but if there is a "lowest common denominator" here it would have to be who builds the best mousetrap.
Microsoft stepped into the (soon to be defunct) PDA market well behind everyone else but still enjoys a really large market share and I think it's fair to say that could also happen with the cellular market.
The licensing issues you speak of are very interesting. It was a long standing agreement that any pc vendor who found a way to improve on the initial pc setup (the wizard you go through when you turned on a new pc for the first time) had to turn there discoveries/changes over to Microsoft royalty free. As of a few months ago, that agreement is no more. If vender X finds a better way to code the wizard they can patent thier approach.
I'm just wondering how many other "unfavorable" agreements there are that Microsoft will have to give up in the near future.
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