Research in a mobile world

There has been a lot of discussion recently about Microsoft announcing that they will make Office applications available for Nokia phones.

I find myself asking: what took them so long, and who will they partner with next?

Microsoft has been running Office applications on Macintosh desktops for years, even though the Mac Operating System (OS) competes with Microsoft's own OS offerings.  Revenue from Microsoft's business software, anchored by its Office suite, is slightly higher than revenue from its "client-side" OS installations.  But more importantly, Office is where Microsoft really differentiates itself. While an Operating System is at the core of a computer, the applications are what make it useful.

In the mobile world, we are eager to see which Operating Systems will win out in the long run.  There are at least seven mobile Operating Systems -- iPhone, Symbian, Blackberry, Android, Windows Mobile, webOS and Linux Mobile -- fighting for market dominance in the burgeoning smartphone market.  For an application developer like Microsoft (or Techneos, for that matter), some form of hedging strategy is required to ensure that you don't tie yourself to the wrong horse(s).

In Microsoft's case, they appear to be acknowledging the need to hedge against even their own mobile Operating Systems. I don't see this as particularly surprising, or even as an indication that they are not committed to their own mobile OS vision. Love 'em or hate 'em, you have to give Microsoft marks for perseverance. I have heard rumours of Microsoft giving up on Windows Mobile for well over a decade, during which time I have also heard countless rumours about the demise (or sell-off) of Palm Inc., neither of which has happened. So while I would hesitate to predict the future of any mobile OS, I also don't put too much weight in any rumours that I hear.

The reality is that mobile computing is still in its infancy, and anyone who is in the smartphone market understands that the pie is going to get a lot bigger before the real champions are determined. What we are seeing now is a classic battle for early share of a market that is exploding before our eyes. For those of us developing applications, we need to stay one step ahead of the general population. We can't be living just in the present, nor can we look too far ahead. The value we provide is to navigate the ever-changing waters before us, acting as "domain experts" in fields that are not our customers' core competencies. For example, in the case of Techneos, we strive to be the most knowledgeable and well-equipped providers of mobile solutions for market and socio-economic researchers. We map our core competency (mobile) to that of our customers (research) to provide a unique and valuable offering.


So how does this all tie back to Microsoft? By decoupling its two greatest core competencies -- business productivity software and Operating Systems -- Microsoft frees itself up to fight the former battle irrespective of how the latter plays out.  In the world of mobile computing, this sort of multi-platform application strategy seems a lot more sensible today than an all-eggs-in-one-basket strategy -- even if the basket is your own Operating System!

Eventually, we will see a small group of mobile platforms emerge as clear leaders in the space. In the meantime, multi-platform mobile applications provide businesses with a comforting buffer between the volatile landscape of underlying technology and the business needs which drive their adoption of mobile computing.