[H-GEN] external USB drive

[Russell Stuart]

On Wed, 2010-12-15 at 16:56 +1000, Nick Kwiatkowski wrote:
> Some of my colleagues went to a presentation recently, between iPhone
> OS / Android / Windows 7.

Let me guess.  This person was a representative of a US company.  Only
someone from the US would ignore phones from the largest seller of smart
phones on the planet - Nokia.

> This market segment is being fought over, and Microsoft is still
> competing strongly.

Yes, the market place is being fought over.  And yes, Microsoft is
trying to compete.  But it is an uphill battle now.  Their mobile phone
sales growth rates have gone negative, which is an dismal effort in what
is one of the fastest growing computing segments.

For a while they did occupy the place in mobile phones they now occupy
with the PC.  They were the primary supplier of a commodity OS to the
mobile phone arena - the OS being WinCE based phones.  They should have
held that position and come to dominate the mobile phone space because
of it, but instead they ceded it to Google.  That happened because
Microsoft's software engineering for WinCE could best be described as
inept.  I had the misfortune to own a WinCE phone, and had a few friends
who did to.  The last time I had to reboot a computer often as those
phones was back in the MSDOS days.

Win Phone 7 is also a WinCE based OS.  If they haven't fixed the
underlying OS they are putting lipstick on a pig.  And having used WinCE
as an embedded OS on projects I have worked on in my professional life,
it is a pig.  Compared to Linux it was a big black binary blob; where
interrupts can disappear into the OS and never to be heard from again.
It was impossible to debug or write unit tests for, and that I suspect
that is why so many WinCE devices I have used have been so unreliable.
Turns out when you are developing for custom hardware having the source
available makes a huge difference.

Looking at Win Phone 7's hardware stipulations, it may be Microsoft
realises all this and is trying to avoid the problem by simply not
allowing much in the way of hardware variation.  That may well solve the
reliability problem, but at the expense of being steam rolled by the
price and hardware range created by the variation Google does
successfully allow now.

In summary while they held the commodity OS supplier crown to the mobile
phone space, they had a chance of establishing a vice like grip on that
space using the same network and scale effects they use to hold that
same grip on the desktop PC  space.  But they lost that grip to a free
alternative, and there are other free alternatives lining up behind that
one.  I'd say its over now.  Whatever chance they had is gone.

> The recent lawsuits against Google are an indication that this will be
> a hot topic, with mobile devices the driving factor. 

I am not sure what Oracle's lawsuits against Google are about.  The most
likely explanation seems to be Oracle is milking the Java cash cow for
all it is worth as it gallantly sails into a cobol'esk like retirement.
But Apple's patent disputes against most of the mobile phone companies
on the planet and the retaliatory patent strikes suits make your point.