Ever since I had my first cell phone in 1991, I was hooked. I can recall walking down the street in my home "town" of downtown Toronto, and the sense of empowerment felt at being able to dial up a friend or make a "connection", not tethered by wires, the nearest power outlet or having to find a free telephone booth.
Now that I have dated myself...Things are much different now, so as we sit here now in 2009, talking about our Apple IPhone vs. incumbunts like the Palm Pre and whether or not RIM will successfully break into this space, and make any significant impact, I think it is important to take pause, and consider the next 5 years and what we might be saying (or using) at that time.
That's why I think the AppStore concept may well be that defining battle ground - and if you consider how much Apple is counting on success here, and the type of competition and engineering capability other firms have now -- I mean just look at how impressive the Palm Pre is and how that came out of nowhere. The barrier of entry here is quite low...and Apple knows it.
They have to take their current success and market dominance, just like they did with the IPod and create such a "sticky" ecosystem that developers will flock to it. I think Microsoft is taking a close look at this right now and thinking to themselves, is this an "opportunity" to leapfrog into this space and try, for once, to beat Apple at their own game? If you ask me, this space is still up for grabs. RIM has the business world locked down - trust me. Apple with their IPhone have the "consumer" market, if not locked down, certainly looking like they will do that...and with convergence of the iPod line and iPhone line, I'm thinking those chances are pretty good. And Apple's chance of breaking into the corporate world - slim to none.
But Microsoft, with their new mobile stack and with a foot firmly planted in both the consumer and corporate world in other platform domains - Microsoft has to be considering their long standing decision to NOT enter the mobile hardware fray. With what Apple is poised to be able to do in this space from a revenue potential, and the legion of developers out there in the Microsoft camp, that I will tell you (being one of them), are not really viral about the Windows Mobile platform - this has to be ground zerio. in fact, Windows Mobile is in a crisis if you haven't heard. So with that developer blood (what's left of it) running through my veins -- as I have spilled a lot of it working for over 20 years with Microsoft development platforms -- from my perspective, Microsoft is failing (or has failed here) and they simply cannot afford to lose here.
It's all up to the Apps folks - and Microsoft still (IMHO) has the largest developer army out there if you consider both the corporate and consumer markets in the aggreage. It's a great time for a gadget lover to be alive - I don't think we can call a winner in this race yet. But in the next 24 months, I think we will.
Do you dare call a winner? Go ahead, put it out there. Let's get those comments popping....
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