Microsoft pulls a fast one
Microsoft is after a coup with their Stinger operating system. Symbian, the market leader in the cell phone IS business introduced their newest version and announced a licensing agreement with Siemens. Meanwhile, Microsoft is hard at work tying up the next generation phone/PDA. To that end, the Microsoft triumphantly announced that HTC the company which makes Compaq's immensely popular iPAQ Pocket PC, has announced plans to build phones using Microsoft's smart phone platform, Stinger. In addition to HTC, Sendo, Samsung, and Mitsubishi have also announced plans to build Stinger-based phones.
Microsoft as you'll remember is hoping to build an infrastructure for products using variations of the operating system through their .NET strategy. Microsoft claims that an end-to-end strategy is required to ensure that the operators, the real power in the telecom business, will opt for Stinger based phones.
We've got no beef with the theory. Sun likewise, is building an infrastructure to support their plans for selling servers and software to the telecom industry. What we don't believe is that Microsoft can actually pull it off. It's not like the company hasn't had these grand schemes before. The grand visions of many a company has ground to a halt as Microsoft promises a scalable operating system and fails to deliver. It seems more likely to us that no one can really do this and the answer instead is an open system built along the lines of the Internet that will allow a variety of operating systems designed for their specific devices to find the points of communication. Forgive us if this sounds obvious.
