| JaggedSac said: WereKitten, I would say the entirety of MS is moving to a services based infrastructure. Their cloud and Live offerings are the tips of what is to come. As for smart phones, the most popular apps are lightweight frontends consuming web services. These apps are quick and easy to build. Once WinMo 7 is out, all the big a0ps will quickly be available. Zune software will be a big deal as well. It will be the app store, movie store, music store with subscription option, and it directly ties to Xbox Live services as well. MS also has a set of services rolling out for their office suites. They already have a photo service available. So yeah, MS is very ready to have a device and OS with a very nice set of services to tap into and an environment for developers to tap into whatever services they would like to as well. |
Of course they are going to follow the trend when it comes to - say - offering collaborative web-based office tools and file serving, or many other services. What I'm saying is that the world of service comsumption is opening up. As such the unique benefit of synergy with a proprietary service is progressively diminishing and the real benefit is going to be the flexibilty of the platform and the quickenss to adapt to the web offering and variety of services and standards.
That hasn't been the forte of MS in the past, because they almost always had total control over the factors that drove forward the OS or the software. They could choose the speed of the treadmill when it came to their users having to upgrade their OS or their Office suit or their development libraries.
When they could not choose these factors, they haven't been quick nor agile to react - see the mess they did with Internet adoption over proprietary networks, see their resistance to every standard they could not control.
I'm not saying they can't do it, I'm only saying that Google has demonstrated they can flow with quick changes where MS' record has been spotty at that. Google's phylosophy has been incarnated very well in Android, whereas the developers' perception is that Win mobile is a relic of a past era, too slow to change according to the web and media pace.
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