Smartphone Thoughts: Talking with John Starkweather of MED Division at Microsoft - Part 2

Mike: I guess my main point is that the average customer on the street who is going to walk into Cingular or T-Mobile, and doesn’t know jack about the different phones out there – how are you trying to reach them to make sure that they make the right choice and pick your phone? But, like you said as things move forward, you are currently focusing on the enterprise customers, and as market share grows, that focus will switch as well.

John: Yeah, but like I said, there are 400+ million Outlook users, that’s our target. And, 400 million, I think that’s a mass market opportunity, especially when we’re selling less than a billion handsets a year. We’re going after half that, and that’s not bad. So, while we might sell to somebody through the mindset of stay on top of your job, the person who’s staying on top of the job is also you and I, and I’ve got all kinds of personal information on my device. In fact, I’ve got one calendar for both my work and my personal life, and the two are mixed. So we feel like there are way more of us, and the channel to go through is that business personality, but it very much is a mass market opportunity. However, there are very few people out there who think of themselves as business users, or as consumers – they think of themselves as people who go to work and play and do all kinds of other things. Give me something that works for me.

Mike: Something that works in all the scenarios that I need.

John: Yeah.

Mike: Absolutely. Compact Framework 2 is not on the phones, is not on AKU2. For developers and everybody else building against this, expecting that the end user won’t have to worry about, do I need this, do I need that, will this work on my phone or not? Is there any reason why that isn’t in AKU2 or upcoming any time soon?

John: I can send you some specific details on that, there’s actually a really good reason, so I’m going to send it to you. It is coming in a future version is what I can tell you.

Mike: Sure, but it’s probably going to be coming in the next release of Windows Mobile, and it’s not going to be something that will be available for existing users to install as part of a ROM update.

John: Let me get you some information, because I know that the team has been working on some backwards compatibility stuff, and this is stuff even last year when we RTNed Windows Mobile 5 they had talked about it. I don’t think it’s as dire as you think. Let me get you the info from the team, and maybe I can even tell you when they’re going to do it.

Mike: Great!