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April 27, 2005
Microsoft getting to go with Smart Phones?
Microsoft hopes to dramatically re-route sales of its competitor, Research In Motion's BlackBerry, with the release of the next generation of its Smart Phone - code-named Magneto - the secret ingredient of which, if we get John Markoff's drift correctly, seems to be some sort of distillation of the philosophy behind the Chinese strategy game, Go.
After losing money for years on its Windows Mobile division - last year it dropped another $US224 million - the Seattle giant tapped one-time maths prodigy Dr Ya-Qin Zhang (pronounced yah-CHEEN jong), 39, who had helped start Microsoft's Beijing research laboratory in 1999 to turn things around. The new product will be the first indication of whether he's likely to succeed.
In what veterans of Windows software engineering will regard as a novel departure from the usual Microsoft style, Dr Zhang has attempted to create a new focus on quality, rather than a grab-bag of new features, most of which are neither understood nor needed.
The old recipe has served Microsoft poorly in the smart phone segment, where competitors like Symbian, owned by a consortium of cellular handset makers, and PalmOne and PalmSource, with its Treo, have been well ahead of the game.
Symbian had 80.7 percent of the smart phone software market in the third quarter of last year, compared with 8.4 percent for PalmSource and 7.3 percent for Microsoft, according to Gartner Dataquest, although most of Symbian's business came from Nokia, ironically largely due to the Nokia Series 60 phone, which is more phone than organiser.
That might be discouraging to Dr Zhang, but what with being a more than useful player of Go, he apparently knows a thing or two about patience.
Frankly we're not completely sure that John Markoff had very much information to work with, beyond the fact that Dr Zhang played Go, and had to be reminded by Microsoft staffers that late-night staff meetings prevented them from eating with their families.
And what are we to make of this inscrutable paragraph?
In his own home, [Zhang] says, phones powered by the new Microsoft software have received favorable reviews from an influential tester: his wife. "When my wife uses the phone, my life is a little better," he said, with his usual penchant for understatement. "I get better meals."
The new phone includes a recipe book?
Posted by cw at April 27, 2005 06:51 PM
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