The Mac Sucks!

As Ars Technica and other sites have reported, Microsoft has made a step toward pushing its employees away from competitors’ mobile phones. Reportedly part of its cost-cutting measures, Microsoft has begun denying employee reimbursement for cellular data plans unless they’re using phones based on Windows Mobile. That means Microsoft will no longer be paying for iPhone and Blackberry data plans.

In the short term, this will no doubt help Microsoft save a few dollars. In the longer term, it’s likely to benefit Microsoft in a lot of other ways. For example, if its employees are “coerced” into using Windows Mobile phones as a result of this shift in policy, that should help the company understand where it can improve Windows Mobile in the future. Users familiar with the Blackberry will undoubtedly put pressure on their peers to develop for Windows Mobile the things they perceive to be superior in the Blackberry platform. Users familiar with the iPhone and other smartphones will put pressure on the developers to enhance the Windows Mobile experience in other ways. In the end, it may make Windows Mobile a much better competitor than it is today. As Ars Technica notes, “Windows Mobile 6.5 may include tons of improvements, but it’s still a long way off from putting Microsoft back in the game (not to mention it’s still not yet available), so even with the incentive to move to Windows Mobile, I doubt many Microsoft employees will make the switch anytime soon. Maybe next year, when Windows Mobile 7.0 is expected, Microsoft employees will start switching.”

According to The Register, RIM’s Blackberry Curve outsold Apple’s iPhone in the first quarter of 2009, according to a survey conducted by the NPD Group. Of course, it helps that Verizon was giving the phones away during February and March as part of a buy one, get one free deal. The Blackberry Curve also costs half what the iPhone costs, which no doubt helped its sales as well. Still, 3 of the top 5 smartphones in the first quarter of 2009 were RIM Blackberry devices, with the iPhone 3G and T-Mobile G1 being the other two.

A light-hearted look at what goes on at the cell phone reunion…

 According to Don Reisinger of CNet, Apple is scared of Research in Motion (RIM) and its new Blackberry Storm, and it “should be scared because of its own shortcomings with the iPhone 3G.” On what does Reisinger base this opinion? He says:

To a certain extent, I see his point. While I firmly expect Apple to include cut-and-paste in an upcoming iPhone update (but I could be wrong), and they’ve indicated that tethering would be possible at some future date, I doubt that Steve Jobs will ever go for the removable battery because it would add lines to the sleek iPhone backside. I also don’t expect the iPhone to ever include a memory expansion slot for much the same reason (it would necessitate a hole in the side of the device somewhere). Why are these kinds of features so important? Let’s look at an example, President-Elect Barack Obama. When it comes to his personal computing, Barack is a Mac user. His cell phone, on the other hand, is a Blackberry rather than an iPhone.

Why would Obama choose RIM’s device over Apple’s? Think about his schedule over the last several months. He spent every spare minute campaigning for the presidency, flying and driving from state to state, city to city, venue to venue. Chances are he didn’t have time to sit down for long enough to charge his phone. With the Blackberry and its removable battery, that wasn’t an issue. He could pop out the dead battery, pop in a charged one, and get right back to “communicating”. Had he used the iPhone, every so often he’d have had to plug the phone in to charge. That would have left him tethered to one location for a while, or left him without a phone. (We’ll assume he only owns one phone.)

For a busy executive, the ability to swap out a dead battery as needed during the day is extremely valuable, and something the iPhone’s “one piece” design doesn’t offer. While I do know an executive with an iPhone, I know many with a Blackberry. Reisinger says, “I have a feeling that the cell phone war between Apple and RIM will look much like the operating-system war Apple is fighting against Microsoft: RIM will hold the business ground and Apple the consumer space. ” That may well be true. As we’ve discussed before, there are reasons why Apple doesn’t do well in the corporate space:

Apple has made strides in these areas. They’ve added Exchange integration, tightened up some of the security holes, and tried to make the iPhone more attractive to business. But RIM has operated in the business marketplace far more successfully than Apple has in the past. While I don’t know that Apple is “scared” of RIM and the Blackberry, I’m sure they recognize that they face a challenge from RIM in the corporate space. It will be interesting to see how, or even if, they choose to respond.

According to The Globe and Mail’s Matt Hartley, Research In Motion (RIM) has changed the smartphone handset game and produced a winner for the consumer market. Their newest device, codenamed “Kickstart” but released as the “Pearl Flip” is RIM’s attempt to grab up a share of the consumer cell phone marketplace.

Co-chief executive officer of RIM, Jim Balsillie said that “Everybody is going gaga about touch, but that’s because nobody thought you could do flop. But with [Pearl Flip features that include] drop hinge, the sure type, and the synchronized screens, we cracked the code.” The article reports that the Pearl Flip has “all the bells and whistles coveted by the consumer crowd – a two-megapixel camera, GPS, and iTunes compatibility – but it also features an external LCD screen which makes it possible to check e-mails without opening the device, a high-resolution inner screen designed for web browsing and video playback as well as a recessed trackball that keeps it slim.” RIM is also apparently working on a touch-screen device that also features a slide-out keyboard.

Do I think iPhone users will abandon their phones for the RIM Pearl Flip? No, not really. But it’s the kind of device that may fill a need for many cellphone users who might have been considering the iPhone or another smart phone and didn’t want to switch to AT&T.

The iPhone’s growing channel inventory and lackluster
sales continue to get attention in the media. Mike Elgan of
Computerworld, in his article “Elgan:
A new iPhone this summer?” makes the point that Apple gained
20% of all smart phone sales with the iPhone and “clobbered”
nearly everyone except Research in Motion (with its Blackberry smart
phone line). RIM had double Apple’s share of the market.

Elgan tells us that he wrote a column earlier
in the year criticizing Steve Jobs for both the timing and substance of
his iPhone announcement. He received a lot of complaints from Apple fans
who thought he was insane, had no ethics, or wasn’t so smart. His
point in taking on Jobs was that “Whether Apple reaches, almost
reaches, or doesn’t get anywhere near reaching its 10 million target
is irrelevant. Announcing that target set up Apple to disappoint and
robbed the company of a chance to beat expectations all around, which it
certainly would have done…[snip]… that’s the trouble with Steve
Jobs’ ‘reality distortion field.’ It doesn’t actually
distort reality, just the perception of reality by those
infected…[snip]… All this ‘disappointment’ and nervous
chatter about Apple’s iPhone numbers is the fault of Steve Jobs. He
gets the credit for delivering such exciting keynotes, and he deserves
the blame when those keynotes set expectations too high.”

The article points out that 1.3 million
iPhones Apple claims to have “sold” are in essence
“missing” in the retail sales numbers. The carriers report
fewer than 3 million iPhone customers on the books. The data, we’re
told, points to the likelihood of these phones sitting unsold (to
customers) in stores, but “sold” by Apple to the carriers
whose stores they’re in. To reach its goal of 10 million iPhone
sales, Elgan tells us that “Apple would need to sell 200% more
iPhones than it already has in order to reach this goal. Either Apple
can’t wait to ‘disappoint’ Wall Street again, or the
company’s got one of three things up their sleeve: New markets, new
prices or new iPhones.”

We agree
with Elgan that new markets aren’t going to get the iPhone to
anywhere near 10 million sales. New pricing probably also won’t
solve the problem, since the phone’s current price isn’t that
much higher than many other smartphones. That lends itself to a new
iPhone version coming in 2008, one that overcomes the criticisms lobbed
at the current model (e.g., lack of 3G network support, poor call audio
quality, no GPS, no user-replaceable battery, and so on). This might
also allow Apple to open the iPhone up to alternate carriers in the US,
since its agreement with AT&T probably covers the “iPhone
1.0″ and not the hypothetical “iPhone 2″. That move
alone might help Apple reach more customers and get close to its 10
million sold goal.

Still isn’t
going to convince me to buy one, though…

On September 14, John Gordon posted a piece on his blog where another blogger
compared Windows Mobile to the iPhone and found Windows Mobile lacking.
At the end of his post, Gordon asks these questions, which I thought
deserved a more-complete answer than I could leave in a comment on his
blog:

• Why has Windows
  Mobile been such a dud?
• Was it because each device manufacturer
  (for many years) had their own version and they, not Microsoft,
  controlled the user experience?
• Was it a deep architectural
  flaw?
• A business problem?
• Microsoft’s
  incompetence?
• All of the above?

Let me
start by giving a high-level overview of what I think has happened up to
this point, and then try to answer those questions. 

Many, many moons ago, Apple introduced the Newton PDA into the handheld
space and showed the world what could be done with a PDA. Unfortunately,
Apple chose a massive form factor for its devices and kept the platform
fairly locked-down. Palm was able to come in with an inferior but
smaller device and effectively drive Apple out of the market they’d
more or less created. 

Around this same time, smart
phones were entering the scene, along with a variety of platforms on
which they could be based. There was Symbian, Java, Palm, and some
others I’m sure I am forgetting, all looking to be the next big
thing in the smartphone space.

Microsoft, sensing an
opportunity to stuff Windows into more hardware, introduced Windows CE,
and later Windows Mobile. Windows Mobile has continued to evolve and
improve. 

Arguably, Apple is trying to redefine what
a smartphone should look like. Certainly, the iPhone doesn’t look
like any other smartphone on the market (or at least it didn’t at
the time of its introduction). That’s no surprise. Apple is all
about flashy, highly-graphical user interfaces and cutting-edge-LOOKING
hardware.

Just as the early Mac OS made DOS and Windows
look like pale imitations of what a GUI should be, the iPhone is
challenging what a smartphone should look like. Will all future smartphones look like
the iPhone? I doubt it, though I suspect to some degree most will
borrow some interface design concepts from Apple (which in turn borrowed them from other sources, as I understand it).

What I think this question is
really asking is “Why haven’t Windows Mobile phones caught the
public’s imagination the way the iPhone has?”  But before
I answer that, I’m going to answer the question as stated.

I don’t think Windows Mobile has been a “dud” if
you consider what Microsoft was setting out to do when it created
Windows Mobile.  In fact, if you look at it from that perspective,
they’ve been extremely successful.  The flaw in that question
is to assume that Microsoft’s goal in the design of Windows Mobile
was to showcase its user-interface design talent.  It wasn’t.

When Microsoft created Windows Mobile, its goal was to claim a part of the
market for embedded operating systems and deliver on those smaller
platforms an experience that was as close to the desktop Windows
experience as the hardware it was running on would permit.
 That’s why, when we look at what’s typically bundled with Windows Mobile we
see things like Pocket Word, Pocket Excel, Pocket Outlook, and Pocket
Internet Explorer (or whatever Microsoft calls them now).  They
wanted the Windows Mobile experience to resemble the Windows desktop
experience. Thus, Windows Mobile wouldn’t (in any default
configuration) ever display a very revolutionary user interface (unless
of course Microsoft changed the interface in Windows similarly).

Compare this to Apple and the iPhone.  Apple may have been
trying to create a “platform” of sorts, but it was very
definitely creating a specific device.  As such, their engineers
and artists knew screen resolution, processor availability, hardware
limitations, etc., from the outset.  They weren’t trying to
create an OS X for the embedded space, but a phone that happened to use
OS X at its core.  Evidence of this is the lack of typical
“Mac” applications like iWork, iLife, and so forth on the
iPhone.  Freed of the constraints imposed by trying to re-create a
desktop OS experience in a confined space, they were able to create
something much different than OS X or Windows Mobile.

Saying that Windows Mobile is a “dud” compared to the iPhone
is like saying that a Ford F-150 is a dud compared to a Mercedes 750IL.
 If you’re a construction worker who needs to haul tools and
work equipment around, the Mercedes might be more fun to drive but
isn’t well-suited to the task at hand.  Similarly, if
you’re looking to haul a bunch business executives to a conference,
the F-150 might be bit less refined than you’re looking for.
 That doesn’t mean the F-150 or the 750IL is a dud.
 They’re just intended for different uses.

In the corporate space, the iPhone would be the real
dud.  Compared to Windows Mobile, it doesn’t support the
opening of Microsoft Word, Excel, or PowerPoint documents.  It
can’t be programmed using Visual Basic or Visual C++.  It
can’t run corporate applications natively.  There isn’t a
wealth of third-party software (at least not yet) available
to run on it.  It’s not available from a variety of vendors,
allowing you to find a device that meets your price and feature
requirements.  It doesn’t hook up to a number of different
carriers (at least not yet, without hacking).  It is, in fact, the
antithesis of what most business users need – which is a subset of
Windows functionality in a mobile package.  Thus, as a corporate
phone, the Apple iPhone is a “cute little toy” but not a
serious business device like a Blackberry, Palm Pilot, or iPaq.

What I think the question really means is “Why hasn’t
Microsoft captured the imagination of journalists and the public with
Windows Mobile the way Apple has with the iPhone?” and again the
answer comes back that it wasn’t Microsoft’s design goal at the
start.  And as nice a guy as he may be (or not, I haven’t met
him), Bill Gates isn’t the snake oil salesman that Steve Jobs is.
 He just isn’t able to pitch Microsoft technologies the way Jobs
can make Apple seem like a technological magic shop.

Neither Windows Mobile nor
the iPhone’s OS X is perfect.  Read most consumer-written (as
opposed to media-written) iPhone articles and you’ll hear stories
about the iPhone locking up, failing to answer calls,
responding slowly to screen touches, etc.  Similarly, you’ll get
stories about Windows Mobile doing many of the same things.  Why?
 I don’t know.  I suspect it goes back to computer science
education in the world today.  Back when I was in school, we were
being taught to try to design elegant, efficient code that used as few
resources as possible.  Today, with wristwatches that have more
power than our desktops had back then, there’s less emphasis on
designing clean, efficient code and more emphasis on cranking out
software to meet arbitrary marketing deadlines.  As a result, I
think Quality Assurance (QA) as suffered across the board.

So, to the extent that there are any “deep architectural
flaws” in Windows Mobile, I’d say there must also be equivalent
flaws in “OS X
Mobile” in the iPhone or such problems wouldn’t surface.
 There is in fact some evidence to indicate the Multi-Touch technology in the
iPhone isn’t without problems, either.

Again, the
main difference as I see it is that Windows Mobile was, when it was
designed, not aimed at the same market segment as the iPhone.
 Could Microsoft have delivered an OS for the smartphone arena that
delivers the “oohs and ahs” that the iPhone does?  I
don’t know.  Given the impressive demonstration they made with
the tabletop OS a while back, I suspect they could.
 But I’m not so sure that anyone at Microsoft could apply the
appropriate level of “Steve Jobsian” marketing to it.

It’s a
business problem in that Microsoft still hasn’t managed to figure
out how to generate that media feeding frenzy that Steve Jobs does.
 Until they can, Apple will tend to steal the spotlight, even when
they have an inferior product or one that’s overpriced.  But
it’s not a business problem in that Microsoft has accomplished with
Windows Mobile what they set out to do, which was to drive Palm and the
like out of the handheld space.  In this respect, they’ve done
well.  The iPhone isn’t a competitor in the same space, so
it’s winning in its chosen space by default.

I
can’t speak for anyone else, but I see a lot less incompetence
coming out of Redmond than I do out of Cupertino.  Microsoft shares
OS release plans with its business customers.  Apple doesn’t.
 Microsoft makes available a great deal of training online, for
free, to customers.  Microsoft hosts online discussions when
security patches are released, inviting a dialog with its customers
about them.  They do listen to their customers a lot, but it’s
all done so quietly and behind the scenes that the typical Windows user
has no idea of the resources available from Microsoft at no charge.
 Microsoft even furthers the Windows “cause” by offering
free visual development tools along with the more-expensive ones, tools
that can be more easily and quickly picked up than those Apple offers
for OS X.

I see Apple releasing patch after patch that
break third-party applications, hardware drivers, and the like.  I
see iTunes not working so well on Windows.  I see
Microsoft, on the other hand, adding all sorts of undocumented code to
Windows to allow legacy applications to continue working after a patch,
transparently to the user.  When I submit a crash report to Apple,
it vanishes into a black hole and I never see it again.  When I
submit one in Windows Vista, it tends to come back to tell me about a
solution they’ve found for the problem or a diagnosis of the cause.
 Sometimes those solutions are given to me days or weeks later, but
I get them.  My crash reports don’t just disappear.

Microsoft openly seeks security bug reports from the hacker and
research communities and implements fixes fairly rapidly.  
Apple seems to attack security researchers, deny that there are bugs, and take an inordinate amount of time to apply fixes to OS
X.

The more I look and listen, the more I see two
things happening.  First, I see the media willing to pick up on and
report anything Apple calls “news” as revolutionary and
unique.  Second, I see the Apple customer base increasingly becoming disenchanted with their
products, disappointed that Apple has left certain
“obvious” features out of them… such as releasing the
iPod Touch with less storage space than most other iPod models,
releasing the iPhone with obvious bugs in it, delaying the release of Mac OS X so it can meet an
arbitrary iPhone deadline, and the like.

To be sure,
Microsoft has a long way to go before it will ever APPEAR to be as
innovative and “exciting” as Apple does.  However,
I’ve seen an increasing level of “competence” appearing in
Redmond in the last several years.  Consider the XBox.
 Microsoft began in a somewhat laughable position and achieved a significant share of the game console marketplace.
 That’s hardly the mark of an incompetent outfit.

If Microsoft decides to compete in the iPhone space, I’m confident
that they’ll be successful because they’ll take one major source
of income under consideration that Apple traditionally doesn’t: the
business enterprise market.  They won’t deliver a
single-carrier, single-network device that can’t be used easily on a
corporate LAN.  And they’ll likely deliver a device running an
OS that has been in the mobile space a lot longer than Apple’s OS X.
 Just as with the Zune and the XBox, Microsoft will start out in an
“underdog” position.  But it will learn, and learn well,
from its customers.  Apple, it seems, only learns from Steve
Jobs…

The Chicago Tribune’s Tech Buzz column by
Eric Benderoff features an article today entitled, “Rich in style, iPhone falls short on functionality
” that makes several important points:

• “Here’s the question every non-iPhone owner always asks: Is
  it worth it? I’ve struggled for an answer since the day Apple Inc.
  put the iPhone on the market. Now, thanks to a $200 price cut, I have
  one: yes. But it’s not for everyone.”
• “Even at
  $400, this phone has limitations… If you’re a road warrior for a
  big firm, stick with the Blackberry.”
• “It froze twice
  during the first week and several times since. It can be quickly
  unfrozen, but it’s still annoying.”
• “The touch
  screen can be too sensitive. Accidental finger swipes are common when
  surfing the web.”
• “From my wife: ‘Doesn’t
  Apple realize there are two genders?’ Fingernails do not work on the
  touch screen; only fingertips. She’s keeping her
  Blackberry.”
• “I can’t use the iPhone to listen to
  music in my car, where the stereo has an iPod connector. Likewise, the
  iPhone won’t work as an iPod in the majority of third-party
  listening devices.”
• “An adapter is needed for
  third-party headphones in the reconfigured headphone slot. This is
  especially frustrating if you own nice headphones for your digital music
  player.”
• “I want more storage. Eight gigabytes
  isn’t enough. A movie takes roughly 2GB of space, for
  instance.”
• “Where are the games? If the iPod has fun
  games, why doesn’t my iPhone? (Yes, I know third parties are making
  some.)”
• “The camera is average and you can’t
  shoot video — a feature that’s becoming standard even on free
  camera phones.”
• “The Edge network is painfully slow
  for the iPhone’s fun features, such as the dedicated YouTube
  channel. Unless you’re using the iPhone in a Wi-Fi zone, much of the
  web experience is frustrating. Hence, mobile web use on smart phones
  that utilize faster 3G networks is superior to the iPhone.”
• “For a phone with a great music player, why can’t I use
  stereo-enabled Bluetooth headphone? Because Apple didn’t include a
  stereo profile for Bluetooth, a big oversight. (There’s a Bluetooth
  profile for an earpiece and it does work well.)”

So there you have it. If these sound like things that
would put a damper on your enjoyment of the iPhone, you might want to
hold off on purchasing it until (and if?) Apple gets them resolved in a
future device or update.