An app for that, thousands of apps, apps don’t matter

19 November 2009 by Shaun 4 Comments

I drove past a bus stop yesterday which has a big advertisment for the T-Mobile G2 Touch (Hero) and it proclaimed that there are 1000’s of apps for it as its main headline.

Apple of course do the same with its “There’s an app for that” tag line and this has worked well so far.

Compare that to this article yesterday in which Ray Ozzie from Microsoft tried to explain that mobile apps don’t matter. It seems that HTC get it, that Apple gets it, but that Microsoft either genuinely do not get it or it is trying to persuade people that they really do not matter.

The irony is that Windows Mobile has a huge body of quality mobile apps and Microsoft just hasn’t managed to make many people aware of that.

4 Comments »

lazyboy said:

There may be a lot of good apps, but most of them were never designed from the ground up for a modern, consumer-facing operating system. Like WM itself, many of the apps look clunky and about as much fun to use as a cheap toenail clipper; so all you ever see of WM devices is lots of superficial flash, like animated clock and weather widgets, and not much else. Can you imagine what a WM “app for that” ad would look like?

Until WM7 is released, don’t expect much to change.

# 19 November 2009 at 3:06 pm

JLP said:

It’s all relative.

When the WM apps were written they were state-of-the-art and not clunky at all, given the tech at the time. Countless people panned Palm for looking dated compared to WM. Now it’s WM’s time to look dated and not follow down Palm’s path. Still, it’s too bad MS didn’t promote the apps at the time. They sort of missed the bandwagon. But studying MS’s history, they are sure to find a way to get back on top.

All the new platforms should endeavor to not follow Palm’s lead–one day iPhone will look dated, too, esp. if Apple doesn’t keep innovating.

# 19 November 2009 at 6:39 pm

lazyboy said:

@JLP

Oh, I completely agree that these things go in cycles. However, when WM first came out it certainly didn’t strike people as elegant at all; in fact, compared to Palm OS it was clunky, slow and poorly designed (many of the same traits it possesses to this day). However, the underlying power of the OS and MS’s corporate clout enabled it to overcome those limitations, and Palm failed abysmally to deliver anything radically new to prevent that happening.

MS and WM will come back, I’m sure of that.

# 19 November 2009 at 7:12 pm

Axim addict said:

If you remember, at first Palm OS had the advantage of having the most applications compared to Windows Mobile.
Then Palm stopped producing cutting edge hardware and many people switched to ‘the dark side’ for VGA screens and alike.
Quickly the situation turned an 180 degrees where Windows Mobile slapped Palm OS around for having the most applications available on the WinMo platform. And Microsoft surely bragged about this third party applications advantage.

Conclusion: Microsoft is full of sh*t when they say that ‘apps don’t matter’. That’s what we call a sore loser who doesn’t want to admit that they should have put more effort into keeping the operating system up to date. I might be going of a tangent here, but Windows Media Player Mobile hasn’t seen an update since the first version in 2000! Except for a slight reskin in 2005 perhaps. Having owned four Windows Mobile devices for years, I’m glad that I have a 3GS now, and not just for the apps…

# 19 November 2009 at 11:28 pm