Microsoft Windows Mobile When completed, leaving potential developers with experience in the tools I wanted to build business applications on-line "with a problem that could target

You may have noticed that Windows Mobile is a dead platform. Microsoft does not talk about it, and if I had to go to your IT department and ask the source of a Windows Mobile phone for you so you can access your webmail and other things outside the office would probably look a little weird, and then we can say that gradually, with careful emphasis, "Do you mean Windows

Phone

No, no. Do you mean Windows Mobile. What do you mean, no one sells? A. Motorola OK, that's all. The few other million units of Windows Mobile devices there are the living dead - in fact, is the land of the zombies

And now here's the funny thing: Microsoft, the company that knows best how to support developers and platforms and applications, has created the perfect conditions in which anyone who has ever thought to develop Windows Mobile now something will be encouraged to do so in Android.

How could this happen? Well, let's step back.

'll get my coat ...

The problem of being in the computer industry is changing so fast that what looks like a very strong business proposition than a year can not be that next year. A good example is when the market moves under you and the world does not need your product (RIM, I'm looking at you). But there are some things that are reliable, and one of the things you can count on if you are a Microsoft shop is that Microsoft will take care of you.

is well known that the power of Microsoft in the market due to the availability of applications. The platform has applications, the easier it is for the user chooses a competitor. (For a modern equivalent of this, consider the devices that compete with the iPhone - try to find applications for a specific business task for Android-based tablet and see how far to go.) For applications that have need to be pleasing to the developers and Microsoft knows how to be nice to the developers in a way that no other sole none. (For example, here are details on the various programs for non-Microsoft developers.)

The vision of the world's current mobile is that everything is wonderful and the size and location of all the cool kids hang out. This ignores the fact that since 2003 has been possible to build a line of very good business (LOB) to what it used to be called Windows Mobile.

How do you build a solution for Windows Mobile

development of Windows Mobile was supported by the. NET Compact Framework in 2002. For starters, Windows Mobile is a smaller version of Windows CE, allowing more extra bits to work as a smartphone. You can put the Windows CE kernel, in theory, anything, and is one of the strands of Windows Embedded.

So the general idea is that if you want to build a mobile solution that is based on Windows CE and get your own equipment from somewhere, or you is based on Windows Mobile and ask the client to purchase their own equipment, ie a smartphone. Remember, this is for LOB work, which is the production of client-specific software that can not (yet?) Find in iOS App Store and Android Market.

If you go through the original order in the material, if you make plans and do a factory, usually in China, we are building for you. If you want to spend one tenth of the cost, you ask the same plant to give off a lot of shelves that were designed. You can then install their own software and ship it. However, the road is not what you say cheap. Although the units are generally very cheap (I think a quarter of the cost of an iPad for a device with a display of five inches), minimum order quantities, with the impossibility of making an inventory, just time, pose a serious cash.

To the problem of rolling out of the equation, many people build mobile solutions become the creation of solutions and Windows Mobile clients requesting to offer the same hardware, which generally means that the client will Vodafone, O2, and anyone buying a bunch of Windows Mobile phones. You can then deploy the application and get it. Although no one has ever

those

these phones worked well enough to market a line of decent size enterprise applications grow around Windows Mobile.

Brand new and improved

I'm not sure this would have happened on the watch of Bill Gates. Be a programmer at heart, he understood the relationship with developers better than Steve Ballmer, who is a type of sale, no, I suspect the decision to cancel Windows Mobile have been banned from the top to have had power. (It's one thing the whole article D from 2008 in which Bill admits that he can veto the decisions of Steve.)
addition, it shows very poor thinking in Redmond. Windows Embedded, which tracks Windows CE and renamed "Windows Compact." The current version - Windows Embedded Compact 7 - has a life support 10 years. This means you can go to their factory in China and ask them build customized Windows CE devices until 2021. It's great if you have an almost unlimited budget - but most SMEs to build Windows Mobile applications do not. Only the best players can play this game . Microsoft just does not understand the impact of the cancellation would have on the Windows Mobile developers.