The Windows Mobile Manifesto

A former Microsoft employee has written a lengthy post about the history of Windows Mobile, noting with regret that the software giant should have owned the mobile market. That sounds pleasant. But it was never going to happen.

If you're a Microsoft or Windows phone fan, you should of course read The war Microsoft should have won. It's interesting because of its insider perspective. But this post provides no new information about that platform or it history. And its entire premise is incorrect.

Interestingly, my own history with Windows Mobile goes back quite a bit further than that of the author of this post, Christian Hernandez, who joined Microsoft as an intern in 2002: In 1995, I was part of a very limited group of people outside the firm beta-testing Project "Pegasus," which included an embedded OS that was eventually named Windows CE (for "Consumer Electronics," despite subsequent denials) as well as early bread-board based hardware that we had to swap out occasionally and then at the end of the testing period to get final NEC hardware. In fact, in 1995, I was plotting a web site called "Pegasus Place" that would have been to Windows CE what the SuperSite for Windows would later be to Windows NT 5.0. (I quickly saw how pointless that would be.)

The initial version of Windows CE was a Windows 95 look-alike, but in gray-scale, and the Handheld PC (HPC) devices of the day that used this system featured clamshell designs with small keyboards and a stylus to replace the mouse. Over time, Microsoft evolved this platform, and renamed it several times, sometimes to avoid legal action from competitors. That's sort of beside the point, but by the time we get to what was called Windows Mobile, it had evolved into a PDA and phone platform.

As is often the case with the defeated, there is an ongoing fiction that things could have---should have---been different and that, in this case, there was a brief moment in time when Windows Mobile had in fact beaten the competition and was somehow the number one solution in some market. But as Hernandez's post demonstrates, that fiction---which I too had fallen for, at one point---is incorrect: Windows Mobile beat Palm, yes, but only as the market for PDAs was winding down. And it never controlled or even led the market for smart phones. Those markets were controlled in the pre-iPhone/Android years by RIM (especially in North America) and Nokia (especially in Europe and elsewhere).

The problem with the market(s) that Hernandez describes is that they were so fluid, and Microsoft found itself adapting Windows Mobile (or whatever it was called at the time) to meet these ever-changing needs. It split the platform into separate PDA and smartphone variants at one point, for example, just trying to keep up.

What Hernandez doesn't describe is the real reason Microsoft failed, and to be clear it was always going to fail. Back in the late 1990s and early 2000s, Microsoft's biggest success, by far, w...

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