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HOW MANY phone devices!?
The negative outlook of Todd's presentation
was meet with an equal but opposite sense of optimism the
following morning when Derek Brown took the stage for his
keynote address. Derek is responsible for the Global Communications
of Microsoft Mobile Devices Division at Microsoft. This
keynote shifted focus to the developer opportunity in the
Smartphone and Pocket PC Phone Edition space.
Derek shared with us a little
of the excitement and vision that Microsoft has for the
"Wireless Ecosystem" as he put it. There is a
battle brewing, or should we say 'BREW'ing in the new smartphone
space and Derek presented the Microsoft strategy as a rather
holistic approach to the market. Microsoft is looking beyond
just the devices or the OS but also looking to the mobile
operators, distribution channels, developer community, and
peripheral manufacturers to plan for victory in winning
market share. For example, Derek shared with us that Microsoft
is working with at least 16 different Mobile Operators and
26 different OEM's. Sure, we can bet that a couple of the
big names are missing from that list but, it sounds like
a significant team is being built with those kinds of numbers.
Derek was reluctant to preannounce any new names but shared
a few that had already been made public. Some of the players
in the Microsoft smartphone camp include names like: Sendo,
Samsung, HTC, Compal, TCL, Cingular, Vodafone, Orange, T-Mobile,
Telefonica and Telstra, as well as VoiceStream, HTC, Verizon,
Audiovox, Sprint, T-Mobile, Orange, Vodafone and HP with
publicly announced Pocket PC Phone edition initiatives.
Speaking with Derek after his talk,
he made it clear to me that the key to this exciting opportunity
is in the numbers. Industry analysts predict that in five
years the already hot mobile communication device market
is going to be a toasty 1.5 Billion-dollar opportunity with
somewhere around 700 Million units cranked out annually.
Stop and think about that for a second.
Seven hundred million potential new
customers a year. Okay, so all 700 million devices won't
be running CE (or the current MS equivalent), but some will.
Exactly how many? Derek wasn't about to quote numbers on
that one just yet and I doubt anyone can. It was clear,
however, that Mr. Brown was confident that if Microsoft
was going to ride the smartphone bus (which of course they
are) they were not going to settle for a seat in the back.
So, for lack of better data let's apply the market share
numbers provided by our doom and gloom friend from Gartner.
He showed the Pocket PC OS as having about a 20% market
share of the PDA market in 2001 and, like the mobile phone
market, Microsoft is playing catch-up there against some
established players. Well if 20% of those 700 million new
customers can purchase and run my software I will be pretty
happy. That would work out to 140 million new potential
customers per year compared to the 2.6 million that we enjoyed
in 2001 or an increase of more than fifty-fold. Extrapolate
a step further, and the Gartner numbers showed Pocket PC's
growing to almost 50% of the market in 2006 and a 50% share
of 700 Million works out to 350 Million or more than 130-fold
growth in our market. Even if these numbers are inflated
somewhere, you can't deny they are intriguing. Developers
selling software on Handango and Pocket Gear may not be
living on easy street from their sales right now but, if
you multiply their monthly sales figures by 100, things
start to get interesting. You can bet that enterprises are
going to be hiring or contracting more developers with mobile
device experience as well, when all of their employees are
walking around with smartphones or phone enabled pdas in
their pockets. Naturally, our Pocket PC apps will need to
be migrated to smartphone versions, but well written .NET
code should make the migrations to this and other platforms
easier.
"Always On" not going to
happen
Later that afternoon John Landry of
ThinkingBytes began his keynote presentation with a quick
ride down the valley of pessimism. One of the first questions
John posed to the audience was if anyone knew "What
is the Fastest Growing Wireless Sector?". Naturally,
by this time in the conference attendees were starting to
get pumped up and the many speakers were starting to fill
our heads with creative fodder so everyone expected John
to reveal yet another great opportunity. Instead the next
slide said "BANKRUPTCY" in big bold letters and
bore the names of about a dozen recently failed wireless
darlings. He followed that up by poking holes in the idea
of "Always On Connectivity" and made a case that
it just isn't going to happen any time soon.
Before any of the riders of the roller
coaster could get off, John quickly turned focus to what
he saw as the positive forces at work that were causing
the "times to be a changin'". Of the many interesting
insights he provided during his talk, I think the most important
one was the concept of the "occasionally connected
model". I found this one simple concept had me rethinking
many of the traditional thoughts on the way developers and
architects approach software design and perhaps the user
experience as a whole.
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