Catching Up On the Server Side
Fat and Rich—Furthering the Lead
The Microsoft Mobility Mission
Forms, Clients, and Developer Kudos
End-User Productivity Really Does Matter
James Governor
September 24, 2002
Another area where Microsoft has made major steps forward is in the mobile space. What makes the company's developer tools strategy so compelling is that the tools are designed for application development with deployment in mind. They help developers think about what the target mobile platform looks like and what capabilities it offers. This is somewhat different from Java development, where the programmer has to know the deployment targets foibles, screen size, UI extensions, and so on. The Microsoft .NET Compact, on the other hand, is designed to allow a single programming model, with device specifics handled in the background, rather than a lowest common denominator approach. Of course this strategy favors Microsoft form factors such as: PocketPC, Windows Powered Smartphones (codenamed "Stinger"), and Handheld PCs.
Although Microsoft claims to support WAP and cHTML1 (which underpins NTT DoCoMo)—competitive issues mean that the carriers and phone manufactures in these spaces have tended to choose J2ME or Motorola's BREW development and service provisioning instead. The likes of Nokia and Sony are afraid to allow Microsoft to establish dominance in their infrastructure space.
Visual Studio .NET is not the i-mode2 developers' development environment of choice. Just ask one. When these mobile application and content developers see literally hundreds of millions of J2ME clients being acquired by consumers the economics assert themselves very quickly, even if those targets do require more debugging and testing.
However Microsoft is fighting a long-term war on the basis of functionality and the richness of its clients. Neither WAP nor Java can yet offer the kind of richness Microsoft GUIs offer. For customers that do buy into MS clients and form factors, the development environment of choice is obvious—Visual Studio .NET.
Meanwhile Visual Basic developers can apply their existing skills to these new form factors to drive demand. Sure some retraining is required—Visual Studio .NET is a fundamentally different architecture for Microsoft developers to learn—but they don't need to learn all of it, and for those concerned with building GUI and client-side apps the learning curve will be a relatively easy slope. None of this is anything new—it's just the hugely successful Microsoft-developers-drive-middleware-sales-playbook in action again.
1. Compact HTML, a streamlined version of HTML developed by Access Company, Ltd. of Japan, for use with mobile phones using NTT DoCoMo's i-Mode protocol.
2. A packet-based service offered by NTT DoCoMo instead of Wireless Application Protocol for mobile phones.
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