Salvaging the situation
A couple of articles have prompted debate in the webosphere today. The NYT has written that Microsoft will be using its CES keynote to talk about tablets, again. Meanwhile Tomi Ahonen - a former Nokia exec and now self-proclaimed mobile guru - wrote that he thinks Nokia's smartphone strategy is the best.
Given Microsoft's failure to generate market enthusiasm for a full-fat (as opposed to mobile) Windows tablet in a decade of trying, and Nokia's rapidly declining smartphone market share, the two statements have met with understandable derision. Notably from WMPoweruser.com, which asked Can Microsoft be this clueless? and well-known tech blogger Robert Scoble, who insisted Nokia is doomed.
Looking at the current mobile market environment, with Apple so dominant and only Google's Android offering a credible alternative in terms of taking market share, it would be easy to join the herd and conclude Microsoft and Nokia are dinosaurs doomed to extinction. But this is premature, not only because the two companies currently still have so much market share, but because their long-term strategies make sense.
Let's start with Microsoft and trying to get full-fat Windows into tablets. It's assumed this will continue to fail as it has for so many years, but things are different now. One of the amazing things about Apple is that it defines the market, not just for itself but for its competitors. It's much better at this than Microsoft and, with the success of the iPad, it has shown Microsoft what end-users want.
So while CES 2010 had lots of vague talk about tablets as a concept, CES 2011 will focus on the ‘iPad killers'. The industry has something to target now; things like the Lenovo IdeaPad U1 have failed to catch on, but the simple tablet has. So far the template is to make them large smartphones, running mobile chips and mobile OSs, but Microsoft seems to be betting that you can come at these devices from the other direction.
Whether Microsoft is right remains to be seen, but both PC chip and OS technology has now advanced to a level where it's possible to build a tablet-type devices with PC specs and still expect reasonable battery life. Also, as Ballmer himself said a couple of months ago in the video embedded below, Microsoft has shown it ‘gets' mobile with the launch of Windows Phone 7, and who knows how much of this will influence its activities in the tablet market.
As we will explore further when we look at Nokia's strategy, one of the biggest advantages Apple and Google have over the chasing pack in smartphones is their developer ecosystems. You can simply choose from a lot more apps on your iPhone or Android device than you can on your WP7 or Symbian one.
But Microsoft already has a developer ecosystem that dwarfs either of those in Windows, which is why it would be foolish to give up on Windows tablets or even to rely solely on WP7 for that form factor.
