WereKitten said:
@Darth
Bad words such as "synergy" apart, you seem to be relying on features and lock-in.
Take the iPhone: it never won on features. It won marketshare because it offered a focused, polished, pleasant experience. It did less than other smart phones, but it did what it did way better. Then came the centralized appstore, of course, taking a page from other OS's book and that again was focused on the user.
Android is following in its footsteps and it offers interfaces focused on user experience and interaction, and a more open version of the development environment.
I have several friends who develop for mobile devices, and that's where most developers are moving to. Very hastily, I might add. Users will follow where the better apps will be born.
Also, synergy with Office and Windows has a lot less value in the days of web applications and -finally!- usable mobile browsers than it had six or seven years ago. Nowadays, it's not MS anymore to dictate what is the must-have service integration.
Today it's gmail, google maps, facebook, twitter, exchange, google apps; tomorrow it might be totally different services but the point is that the game has changed to those development environments that rely on interfacing with many different and changing services and data sources and treat them as first-class citizens. That's basically what the Android OS is built around.
So it seems to me that it will take MS more than leveraging synergy or adding features, it will require them a change of focus with the OS itself, a change of philosophy with the platform. Which are way harder.
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Devs are indeed flocking to mobile devices.
I remember a quote from a co-worker of mine, who was the manager for the Torque Game Builder (TGB) which is a 3rd party gaming engine similar to UE3 and Unity.
Her quote was this (about developer interest in certain platforms):
Last year at GDC, the only platform that was discussed was the Wii. This year, no one talks about the Wii, they all want to learn and dev for the iPhone.
This is for a major gaming engine that supports multiple platforms. It was a very interesting quote, given how big GDC is. I'll continue to say it, as I have been for the past 6 months: In 10 years, handheld devices from Nintendo and Sony will cease to exist as we know them. Mobile phones will surpass them as the primary handheld gaming device.
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