Wireless is a World of Devices (And Microsoft Plans to Live in All of Them)

One way to tell the story is that there was a lanky, bespectacled man walking around Geneva, Switzerland, back in October 1999 talking to people about new ways to use a mobile phone. That's how employees of Microsoft like to put things — in an understated and modest way that belies the dominance and influence the software giant retains over scores of industries.

For a detailed look at the complete arsenal of Microsoft wireless initiatives, see the table at the bottom of this feature.

Here's another way to tell the story: The setting is the Telecom '99 trade show in Geneva, the industry's largest and most globally pertinent event. The new mobile “way” is an interface layer for mobile devices developed by Microsoft and code named Stinger (more recently renamed Smartphone). The aim is to bring a Windows-like interface to devices such as mobile phones.

And the man? Well, he was no Swiss villager out for a constitutional. He was Microsoft's chairman and chief software architect, Bill Gates.

That was the beginning of Smartphone's journey — from a new idea by Microsoft's head visionary down a development path marked by some criticism and perceived market delays, and ultimately to the doorstep of Orange, the U.K. mobile service provider. The Smartphone-powered handset shopped by Orange to its customers since last October was made by a device manufacturer called High-Tech Computer.

Smartphone is the equivalent of Microsoft's PDA interface PocketPC system, but it is targeted instead at the evolution of the traditional mobile voice handset into a convergent voice/data device. Both interfaces rely on Microsoft's Windows CE operating system.

In the years since Gates demonstrated the early Smartphone interface — which essentially proclaimed his vision for Microsoft's role in the converging wireless voice/data industry — Smartphone has become Microsoft's most significant point of impact with the existing mobile market hierarchy. “We are making tools to make the developer community more ambitious about what a mobile handset is actually capable of,” said Juha Christensen, corporate vice president of Microsoft's Mobile Devices Marketing Group and in many ways Microsoft's point man with the feudal mobile community.

It is a community dominated by international and national service providers and globally recognized brands, but arguably most influenced by a core group of handset makers, including the top three in the market: Nokia, Motorola and Ericsson. None of those firms has yet thrown support behind Smartphone, and all three — as well as Sony and Samsung, the world's No. 4 and No. 5 handset vendors, respectively — continue to support rival efforts to build interfaces based on the Symbian operating system, an alternative to Windows CE. Also, during the last four years, Smartphone has become one piece of a sprawling and perhaps disjointed effort by Microsoft to stake a claim in one of the few global industries where it has yet to gain firm footing.

The Smartphone and the strategy that surrounds it are, in typical Microsoft fashion, a bit late to a mobile data party in which the attendees have already chosen their dance partners or bellied up to the bar. While Microsoft has been organizing its mission — which it says carries the central theme of extending a Windows-like experience from the desktop to an increasing contingent of mobile enterprise workers — other companies have been busy usurping that mission and running ahead of it.

“Unfortunately, these people [CEOs and CIOs of corporate enterprises] had to go elsewhere before to fulfill their mobile needs,” Christensen said. “Now we have twelve thousand sales people calling on these enterprises and talking to them about how to make their enterprises mobile. We've realized they need a richer platform, as well as richer protocols and richer devices.”

Several other companies have jumped into the fray. Some, like Research in Motion, have created the richer devices of which Christensen spoke. With its translation server, RIM's BlackBerry allowed mobile users to take advantage of Microsoft's Outlook e-mail system long before Microsoft produced anything comparable. In PDA technology, Palm and Handspring designed operating systems and interfaces that have won early market share.

In closer relation to the converging mobile voice and data market, the corollary to these companies is Symbian, the London-based software developer that lured venture backing from the top five device makers for its Symbian OS and enjoys an especially close relationship with Nokia, the No. 1 handset vendor.

“Microsoft really needs to have a relationship with a top-tier handset maker,” said Bob Egan, founder and president of wireless consulting outfit Mobile Competency.

Christensen pointed to Microsoft's recent partnership with Samsung as evidence that it already has done so — though Samsung, looking to cover all bases, also is making handsets based on Symbian OS and is among a number of handset makers investing in Symbian.

Christensen may know better than anyone what Microsoft has to overcome in facing Symbian's system and the company's alliance with device makers: He helped start Symbian and worked with Psion, a Symbian investor, before that. He now adheres to the general Microsoft position that because the Symbian OS is just an operating system and reliant on other developers to come up with interfaces — and still more developers to produce applications — the end product isn't as well-connected to the back-end operating system as devices and applications based on Windows CE and Smartphone.

“I don't disagree with Symbian's approach, but it's a somewhat limited approach. The device needs to light up from the inside, and you get that when the applications are deeply connected with the back-end system,” Christensen said.

Ed Suwanjandir, global product marketing manager for mobile devices at Microsoft, added, “With the Symbian OS, development of the interface is happening by committee [with several device makers involved]. That can be very difficult.”

Still, Symbian is the one with top-tier handset vendor partners, relationships that have quickened its pace to market. To that end, the Samsung support is significant to Microsoft in that Samsung is the first maker of phones based on the dominant North American standard — CDMA — to use the Smartphone platform.

“The aim is to build software that transcends wireless network technologies, but the CDMA vendor support is significant because there are more than one hundred million subscribers using it,” Suwanjandir said.

Aside from that recent progress, Christensen said he recognized the need to have many more similar alignments with handset makers in order for Smartphone to be widely adopted. “The Samsung relationship is a strong relationship with an important vendor in the market,” he said. “It will be an accelerator for our success to have this level of partnership — but the mobile phone market also has become very fragmented, and you have to have many relationships.”

Microsoft also has partnerships with Orange GSM/GPRS device maker HTC, a Taiwanese firm, and another Taiwanese company called Compal Electronics, which has yet to introduce its handset. It also had a previous relationship with U.K. phone vendor Sendo, but Sendo pulled out of the partnership late last year and has since backed developments based on Symbian OS — actions that triggered lawsuits filed by Microsoft and Sendo against each other that remain unresolved.

Analysts interviewed for this story, several of which either spoke on background only or requested anonymity, said Microsoft needs to recover from the public mudslinging regarding the Sendo relationship — as well as the impression that Smartphone devices are late to the market — by convincing Nokia, Motorola or Ericsson to try Smartphone. “For this interface to reach the mass market, one of these companies needs to give in,” one analyst said.

Likewise, Microsoft must get more big carriers on its side. In addition to Orange and its SPV handset, Canada's Bell Mobility recently committed to use the Smartphone system. But arguably, the system's greatest test will come in its commercialization by T-Mobile, which announced Smartphone support late last month.

“Network operators are our primary partners. We're extremely aligned with them in terms of market motivation,” Christensen said. “There are people in my group who do nothing except talk to the service providers. There are many rumors about who we'll work with next, but it's safe to say that we are lining up many [carrier deals],” he said just days before the T-Mobile announcement.

T-Mobile already offers Microsoft's Phone edition of its PocketPC interface for the handheld computing devices its sells. Another adopter of PocketPC Phone edition is AT&T Wireless, which is rumored to be nearing a Smartphone deal.

While Smartphone carrier support ambles along, the basic non-phone PocketPC interface based on Windows CE, which competes with various interfaces based on the Palm OS, also has garnered much carrier support. Verizon Wireless, Sprint PCS and German mobile operator O2 all sell devices based on it.

Carriers' slow adoption of Smartphone could have some root in the fragmented device market to which Christensen alluded. There is such an increasing number and variety of traditional handsets, voice/data handsets and pure-data PDAs on the market that customers are bound to be a little overwhelmed. Add to that criticism that Microsoft is simply forcing desktop-dominant Windows into a mobile environment, and the result is a field of skewed perceptions that must be overcome.

“What we're doing is totally not Windows for mobile,” Suwanjandir said. “We built Smartphone from the ground up. There are some elements of Windows that make sense, but we also kept various Windows features out of Smartphone, and PocketPC has some things that Smartphone doesn't. You might say the PocketPC is a data-centric device and the Smartphone is voice-centric.”

Suwanjandir asserted that Smartphone “is a phone first.” Not everyone agreed.

“But is it a good phone first?” one analyst said. “It's OK as a phone, which is why they need to engage a top manufacturer.”

To be fair, some analysts are vague in their judgments of the early Smartphone efforts, describing the Orange SPV device as “slightly bulkier” and “a little more demanding of battery power” than other devices, though Suwanjandir said Microsoft worked hard keep the typical handset's form factor from changing.

“The phone should remain the same,” he said. “In designing our system, we were careful not to change the phone itself. The variety of things it can do should change.”

Suwanjandir said Outlook was always core to Smartphone's development — including all the components of Outlook to take mobile and sync with the desktop, as was the ability to get applications over the air through a server. In addition, there's Internet Explorer, Windows Media Player and MSN Messenger, he said.

While Microsoft apparently has not convinced everyone that it has translated its “phone first” philosophy to market, it does seem to have the right attitude heading into an increasingly complex market for mobile devices. “Within the next three years, there is going to be an incredible proliferation of devices,” Christensen said.

“There will be much broader segmentation in the market, and devices will be targeted at specific segments of people.” Suwanjandir added, “A few years ago, the industry thought there would be some kind of Darwinsim that would lead to a single device being dominant, but that won't happen.”

When it comes to whether the future wireless landscape will be one of multiple operating systems and interfaces, Microsoft demurs from saying it wants to rule. “There could be multiple ways of getting these experiences to people. There could be more than one platform, but hopefully we will do a better job of it than others,” Christensen said. “I think we have been different in looking at the smart device as a holistic approach.”

In this approach, the interface should be consistent to the physical nature of the phone, but allow for applications to be customized to different user experiences. For example, Christensen said that whereas a banker might want a mobile data experience that includes easy access to the Wall Street Journal Web site in a form that he could view and navigate on a small device without losing information, a waveboarder might want a completely different set of applications.

“It will be up to the ecosystem of device makers and application developers to figure that out,” Christensen said. “We are the enabler.”

Though its device efforts are still in the early stages, Microsoft's size, power and influence as a market maker ultimately may ensure it a major and enduring role in the wireless industry.

Analyst Alan Reiter has called Microsoft “the Borg,” referring to the collective entity that is a persistent enemy in “Star Trek.” “They just keep on coming,” Reiter said — a description that is typical of how Microsoft is sometimes characterized as an “evil empire” that expects applications, devices and users to conform to its philosophy. Christensen and Suwanjandir both insisted that users come first — that despite the importance of having carrier and device vendor backing for their efforts, they must focus on the user experience.

But one thing is certain: If Microsoft fails to succeed in wireless, it will not for lack of experimenting. Microsoft's participation in wireless over the years has been dotted with the occasional flop. In addition to the failed Sendo partnership, Microsoft once was a primary investor in the ill-fated Teledesic satellite network. More recently, in 2001, it backed out of its Wireless Knowledge joint venture with Qualcomm.

Even now, Microsoft has its tentacles reaching in several wireless directions. Suwanjandir said there are about seven different groups within Microsoft working on various wireless initiatives. For instance, besides Smartphone and PocketPC, the company offers a TabletPC interface based on Windows XP rather than Windows CE. Another group is working on how the MapPoint.Net location application integrates mobility.

Then there's SPOT. The Smart Personal Object Technology initiative is a plan much-derided by analysts that is based on the integration of software and communications protocols into wristwatches, machinery and even common household appliances to create “smart objects” capable of using another Microsoft solution, the DirectBand FM sub-carrier transmission protocol, to communicate with each other.

The development of SPOT is one of the things that makes Microsoft's breadth of wireless projects seem confusing. “SPOT is a very odd thing based on some technological developments that were first made twenty years ago,” said one analyst. “Whether it connects with Smartphone isn't the point, but is having to pursue that taking time and resources away from something like Smartphone?” (Suwanjandir said the SPOT development, which Microsoft publicly announced at this winter's Consumer Electronics Show, is not competitive with other projects and, despite the fact that it employs an alternative wireless network to transmit data, would not be competitive to carriers in any way.)

There is at least one potential solution to help unite an array of efforts that currently make Microsoft's wireless strategy appear a little disjointed. Egan of Mobile Competency said Microsoft needs one high-level motivator to unite these efforts in a more cohesive fashion. “There's not a real mobile evangelist there, on the level of Gates or [Microsoft CEO Steve] Ballmer,” Egan said.

It's true that in the past, Gates' championing of a cause — and subsequent mobilization of the entire company behind it — has time and time again made all the difference in Microsoft's market impact. A couple of years ago, with computer and e-mail viruses a growing concern and criticism of desktop security solutions rising, Gates aggressively pushed the company into finding solutions. The result has made anti-virus software a standard element of the Windows desktop.

An even clearer example of such evangelism is what happened several years ago with Internet Explorer. It once had only a small percentage of a browser market ruled by Netscape until Gates made it Microsoft's dominant mission to get Internet Explorer on every business desktop — and work equally hard to keep Netscape off.

“The whole company worked hard to get businesses on the Internet,” Christensen said. “It was a brushfire of all divisions in Microsoft working toward the same goal.” And though the consequent pervasiveness of Internet Explorer is one of the facts that critics turned against Microsoft during its antitrust court battle with the federal government, one can hardly argue with the results: Internet Explorer commands the market.

With Gates now known more for his great philanthropic activities than his role as chairman of Microsoft, has that sense of a unified mission disappeared? Those on the device group don't think so. “Now the brushfire is in wireless,” Christensen said. “All divisions in Microsoft have come to realize how important wireless is, and how it connects to what we have already done in the enterprise.”

Christensen admitted that the variety of wireless tracks being pursued by various groups within Microsoft leads to some situations “where you find out another group was developing some thing you didn't know about.” He said he saw this firsthand in a high level meeting with AT&T Wireless officials when the carrier was getting ready to introduce the PocketPC Phone edition. “This other group got up and demonstrated some things with MapPoint.Net that I hadn't known about,” Christensen said. “It presents a challenge, but I like to have some of that going on because progress happens very quickly on these small teams, and that gives you tremendous agility rather than everyone being single-minded. You've got to be willing to let things get a little out of control.”

While that possibility of renegade competing efforts within one company would suggest disaster in some corporations, it seems to be just another one of the trademarks of the freewheeling creativity and workaholic attitude that has made Microsoft what it is. Being behind in a market or pursuing a different track has never hurt the company before — or at least has not set it so far back that it couldn't recover. Rather, by pursuing all possible ideas and retaining a stubborn competitiveness that many people have said works against the idea of open applications, Microsoft has most often come out a winner.

The breadth of the company's efforts in wireless sticks to its time-honored pattern of market success and does not in any way suggest a lack of central commitment to wireless, Christensen said. “We make long-term investments in strategies — even if it means falling behind a bit at the beginning to get it right.”

 

Changing Lanes: Microsoft's Juha Christensen

In telecom, executives cross the street every day to work for firms against which they once competed. But rarely do they cross the ideological borders that Juha Christensen did.

In the late 1990s, Christensen co-founded Symbian, the London-based software developer created with venture backing from Nokia, Motorola, Psion and other handset makers to craft a smart operating system to support data applications in next-generation mobile handsets. Having previously been a licensing executive at Psion and with start-up PressOne Telecom also under his belt, Christensen even helped write the business plan for Symbian.

But in late September 2000, he turned on his heels and left Symbian for its single largest enemy, Microsoft. It was Symbian that had carved out an early business for mobile handset operating systems when Microsoft appeared to fall behind in the market for so-called “smart phone” software platforms.

At the time, it was confirmation for Symbian and other software players familiar with Microsoft that it was another case of the software giant making up for lost development time by buying off its competitors' best and brightest.

Of course, no one forced Christensen to make the move, so why did he? “When I was thinking about leaving Symbian, one of my concerns was that if you only work on the device side or you only work on the OS side, the user might not get the fullest experience,” said the 38-year-old Christensen. “There is such a deep integration between the software platform and the user interface and how that changes the behavior of the device.”

So is there room for both Microsoft and Symbian in the market for mobile handset operating systems? “That is a very hard question for me to answer,” Christensen said. “Microsoft has the back end and the interface and the whole ecosystem of developers to draw from.”

Christensen has said that a chief philosophical difference between Microsoft's approach to wireless data and the approach of Symbian backers such as Nokia is that Microsoft believes there is only one Internet. “Nokia talks about the mobile Internet as if it is a separate thing,” he said in a speech at Stanford University last year.

He also said that running the mobile device group within Microsoft is like running “a start-up with a legacy business attached to it,” a view which sometimes rankles his boss, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer.
— Dan O'Shea

MICROSOFT'S WORKS IN WIRELESS

Windows XP: Has built-in security features supporting standards such as Wireless Equivalent Privacy (WEP) and 802.1x. Windows XP also enables automatic encryption and authentication for user data protection. With Windows XP's connection wizards and wireless networking support, users can have automatic wireless setup to roam from Wi-Fi hotspot to hotspot without having to reconfigure their computer. The Bluetooth support from Microsoft enables classic cable replacement scenarios for which the technology was designed. The initial scenarios that we are enabling are the wireless desktop and connectivity. The wireless desktop allows for frequently used peripheral devices such as a mouse, keyboard, and printer to be connected to your Windows XP PC without wires. Anywhere connectivity to the world-wide-web can be realized by using a mobile phone as a modem for a Bluetooth-enabled notebook PC. With Windows XP Support for Bluetooth Enabled Devices, Bluetooth hardware developers now have a standard that makes their Windows development choices easier, and key manufacturers such as Ericsson and Hewlett-Packard are now building products on the Windows XP Bluetooth format. With Windows XP SP1 on their PCs, users can now take advantage of devices with this Bluetooth format.

Smartphone: Software platform for wireless phones

Pocket PC: Software platform for wireless PDAs

Windows CE .NET: The software platform for building a range of mobile, small footprint devices, including PDAs, Smart phones and Industrial Automation solutions that support the latest multimedia, Web browsing, and power management tools.

MSN Mobile: MSN® Mobile delivers a host of Web-based customizable, wireless information services to different devices.

.NET Compact Framework: On Pocket PC, applications can use the Microsoft ADO.NET data classes to access corporate data over a wireless connection. Also on Pocket PC, e-mail is available through Pocket Outlook®. On smaller devices, such as mobile phones, corporate data and e-mail can be made available through the carrier network by means of XML Web services and Microsoft Mobile Information Server.

Visual Studio .NET 2003: For mobile developers, offers full support for the more than 200 Web-enabled devices, including Website META Language-capable phones, pagers and wireless PDAs via the ASP.NET mobile controls in both Visual Studio and Windows .NET Server 2003. Integration with the .NET Compact Framework enables Visual Studio developers to target the Pocket PC, Pocket PC Phone Edition, and other Windows CE .NET devices.

Exchange Server 2003: port for Outlook Mobile Access functionality in Mobile Information Server. New version will support iMode, cHTML, and WAP 2.0 micro-browsers; and new Short Message Service (SMS) alerts to devices when new information arrives in the Inbox and is available for synchronization.

Microsoft Speech SDK 1.0 Beta 2: A tool set for creating telephony and multimodal applications. A speech platform also runs on a Windows server and allows development of Web-based speech applications for PCs, telephones, cell phones, Pocket PCs and the Tablet PC.

Microsoft Research Asia: Wireless and Networking Group: Conducting research on wireless and/or Internet communication and networking, such as wireless wide area network, Wireless LAN, Bluetooth personal area networks, and peer-to-peer networks, mainly focusing on QoS issues at different network layers, within each network and across networks.

Microsoft Research -Redmond: Systems & Networking: Several wireless projects include RADAR, which is a system for locating and track users within buildings using an off-the-shelf radio-frequency wireless LAN. RADAR enables deployment of location-aware applications and services.

Microsoft DirectBand: Enables transmission of Web-based information to smart objects. DirectBand includes a custom radio receiver chip, a wide area network based on FM subcarrier technology and new radio protocols to create a high-bit-rate, noise-tolerant radio system. To build the wide area network, Microsoft is working with major broadcasters. The wide area network will initially provide nationwide coverage of more than 100 of the largest population centers.

Microsoft Broadband Networking: Wi-fi networking products allowing consumers to share their broadband internet connections wirelessly with one or more home computers. The product line includes a Wireless Base Station, a Wireless USB Adapter and a Wireless Notebook Adapter.

MapPoint .NET: Location-based services is a hosted, programmable XML Web service for integrating maps, driving directions, distance calculations, proximity searches and other location intelligence into a wide variety of consumer and enterprise mobile applications and services.

SPOT Technology: The Microsoft® Smart Personal Objects Technology (SPOT) initiative aims to make everyday devices’ core functions smarter and better with the addition of software. Rather than creating new devices and form factors, smart objects are common, everyday items, such as wristwatches, clocks, pens, key chains and refrigerator-magnet clocks.

Tablet PC: Tablet PCs provides notebook PC features and performance with added features to improve mobile computing, including a natural interface for entering data using a tablet pen, an ultra-light form factor, and advanced handwriting and speech recognition capabilities. Windows XP Tablet PC Edition is a complete superset of Windows XP Professional.