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Windows Phone must attack Google ecosystem

Microsoft's developer strategy will be crucial to overcoming the might of its chief rival.

Jon Tullett
By Jon Tullett, Editor: News analysis
Johannesburg, 02 Jul 2015
Lumia 930 family: The Nokia Lumia 930 is Microsoft Nokia's flagship smartphone, with great specs and excellent apps, let down by poor integration.
Lumia 930 family: The Nokia Lumia 930 is Microsoft Nokia's flagship smartphone, with great specs and excellent apps, let down by poor integration.

In the first half of this dive into the Windows Phone environment, I looked at the Nokia Lumia 930, a flagship Microsoft device, and some of the issues with its out-of-the-box experience. In this part, I will look more closely at how Windows Phone fits into enterprise environments, and the forward strategies that Microsoft is enacting for application developers and the broader ecosystem.

Business apps

Enough about the experience, what about business apps? One of my key areas of evaluation was going to be the productivity app stack on the phone, because Microsoft Office in particular is a major point of attack for the company. And this was where I started to question my assumptions.

At first cut, the Lumia was off to a bad start. ITWeb is a Google Apps customer, so I have plenty of documents in Google Docs, and there are no Google Docs apps for the Windows Phone. The mobile browser experience for Docs is decidedly suboptimal, so immediately I was struggling to make the Lumia fit into my daily workflow. Some apps where I'd had to effect workarounds (like Asana) were managing without trouble, but documents were going to be a problem. That's disappointing, because the Office (Word, Excel and PowerPoint) apps on both Windows Phone and Android are excellent, and OneDrive provides central access and collaboration.

Most of the major enterprise ISVs have Windows Mobile in their portfolio, so provided the underlying integration problems get ironed out, there's no reason why Windows shouldn't be well positioned. Its devices are solid and well priced, and the mobile management is no worse than any other platform.

If you're an Office 365 shop, or even a legacy Office environment, Windows Phone fits well, but Microsoft took the major step of releasing Office apps on iOS and Android earlier this year, so users on Windows (phone or desktop), Android and iOS should all be equally integrated and productive. I'd argue that right now, provided you have made the right ecosystem choices, Windows Phone is the most productive device you can buy, even though I still rate the hardware configuration of the Blackberry Passport as superior.

I, unfortunately, do not have such an ecosystem.

Wait a minute. Hold, as they say, the phone.

I'm locked in.

This isn't Microsoft's fault. It's not even Google's fault. It's mine.

Mea culpa

Many years ago, I helped a colleague rescue some trapped data. It was important but old information, stored in a Word document, and the contemporary Office 2000 couldn't open it. OpenOffice luckily could, and my colleague proceeded to get a lecture about the risks of proprietary data formats.

I should have listened to my own lecture, because almost 20 years later, I've made the exact same mistake. Seduced by device ubiquity, I became blind to platform lock-in: Google Docs was a great choice at first because it gave me what Microsoft could not - universal access and collaboration from PCs (local and remote), tablets, and (Android) phones. Access and collaboration were the killer features, but I should have been more alert to the risks.

Fast-forward a few years, and those killer features are now pretty standard, but Google has locked users into its ecosystem, and it's unlikely to let them go. Ask yourself, for example, why offline Google Docs aren't in a standard file format like ODF to facilitate editing by third-party software.

There are some third party tools which attempt to work around the problem in various ways, but they are all clunky, risky, and incomplete. If you have workers with non-Android devices, and you're considering Google apps, think very hard about lock-in. It's a fascinating reversal to watch - Microsoft used to be the file format lock-in pariah just a few years ago. How things change when you're the underdog, huh?

Seduced by device ubiquity, I became blind to platform lock-in.

The obvious argument in Google's defence is that there are so few Windows Phone users that it doesn't make sense to support apps for them. I'm not sure I buy that: again, they could support standard offline file formats with ease. Also, even small percentages of such a huge user base means there are millions of Windows Phone users out there. But lastly, the unified build process that's coming in Windows 10 means this will practically disappear as an excuse, and that will require Google to either come to the party, or officially shed its "do no evil" facade and admit that its garden has walls as high as Apple's. With spikes on top.

Windows 10 and the way forward

On which note, let me talk about the future of Windows. Windows 10 promises many things, but a few are particularly relevant from a Windows Phone strategic perspective.

One is unified build. Microsoft is expanding the capabilities of its build environment in many important areas, such as better support for other platforms, and for open source projects like Git and Apache Cordova (and a whole lot more - the ecosystem is expanding like crazy). You care about all that if you're a developer, but you really care about it if you're an app publisher. This will mean it should become vastly easier to create one codebase for your mobile apps, and then publish them across Android, iOS and Windows.

Microsoft is taking the fight to the market on two fronts: the end-user device where it is at a massive disadvantage; and the backend development stack where it has traditional strengths. The obvious strategy is to use the development stack to level the playing field, and many of the announcements we've seen are squarely aimed at exactly that. The threads extending to cloud services and agile team development are all aligned in similar directions. And what's interesting is that most of it is inclusive of open standards, rather than the traditional "embrace, extend, extinguish" strategy of old (and I am watching for that, believe me).

Also, the unified codebase model for Windows 10 means app developers will build one app, then publish it to desktops, tablets and phones in one go. This is big in two respects: first, while the Windows Phone app store is fairly meagre compared to iOS or Android right now, the gigantic mass of developers producing desktop apps will now have no reason not to produce phone versions at the same time, so the pool of apps should grow rapidly. Second, major players (including fierce rivals like Google) which have desktop software will be able to offer desktop capabilities and simultaneously support those capabilities on phones. More to the point, they will have strategic questions to answer if they fail to do so.

Execution

Platform support

Here's a list of Microsoft apps in the Google Play store for Android:
1. Sunrise Calendar (which oddly doesn't show up if you list all the Microsoft apps, so this list may be incomplete)
2. Office Mobile
3. Outlook
4. Office Lens
5. Excel
6. OneDrive
7. PowerPoint
8. Microsoft Account
9. OneNote
10. Xbox 360 Smartglass
11. Remote Desktop

And here's a list of every Google app I could find in the Windows Phone store:
1. Google Search

I set out with the Lumia to evaluate whether a Windows Phone could replace Android in my not-atypical enterprise workflow, and to assess the strategic vision of the Windows Phone ecosystem.

In strategy, the answer is a strong yes. Execution is obviously the key, both in the immediate delivery of the new build tools, and then the adoption by the development community and the rollout of Windows 10. On paper, the components are not only there, they are showing great promise, and the vibe in the developer community (even the non-Microsoft parts) is positive.

On the device side, I'd venture a cautious yes. Yes, but I'm not sure I want to yet. Most of the apps I need are there and are in most cases superb; the device is more than good enough for my needs; and the UX is mostly a pleasure to work with. There's a wealth of thoughtful touches which I liked, the home screen UX became second nature surprisingly fast, and most of the niggles were minor, even for a dyed-in-the-wool Android user like myself.

But there are some major shortcomings that I will specifically look for improvement in Windows 10. There are serious integration concerns which I will expect Microsoft to tackle as a priority, and there are also some which require a bit of soul-searching on the part of users and organisations in similar positions to my own: do I really want to migrate masses of documents out of the lock-in of Google Docs, to facilitate more open access to data? Can I afford not to?

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