Though I hate to admit it, one of the great things about having a Windows Moble is that is like having a little Windows computer in your phone. Though it runs on a completely diferent operating system the interface is very familiar. Every time I use a Windows Mobile product, I am reminded of all the good things about Windows, and believe me there are some. If I ran Microsoft I would be out on the street courners handing these suckers out for free. Given the disappointments of the Zune, Vista and the X box 360 one ould think that Microsoft would be be jumping all over its Windows Mobile platform. But such has not been case.I believe one of the bigest mistakes a company can make is to nickle and dime its customers. I was a dire hard Newton fanatic. Though it no longer works it still has place of honor in my wedding chest. But I could never get over the fact that until the final modles the Newton did not come with free software to transfer files back and forth from the computer.
While many speak to the high price and initial problems with hand writing recognition, I believe this one feature did deathly damage to the product line. It left a large part of its customer base with a crippled piece of equipment. So when I recieved my first Windows Moible product, a cingular 2125 I was happy to see that it came with not only a program to transfer files, Activesync, but also a version of Microsoft Office Outlook, a product that I would have never considered buying. I began to use outlook to syncronise my phone calender with the computer.
I was shocked to learn that now many if not all new phones come without a version of Outlook express and that the newest version of Activesync does not even support the version of Outlook that came with my phone a couple of months ago. Now I use a different calender all together. This seems to me a classic case of being penny wise and pound foolish. Microsoft faces almost no competition in profesional e-mail applications. But it does increasing competition in the OS world.
Having the calender function dependent on Outlook has not made me anymore eager to drop Open Office, but my little Mobile Windows was giving me a warm fuzy feeling about Windows that probably was worth a lot more.
Instead of finding ever more frustrating ways to squeez a little money out of Windows Mobile users, I believe that Microsoft would be much better served by folding Zune's functions into Windows Mobile and using Windows Mobile as a gateway to the primere product.
