Today is an historic day in Redmond: the day Microsoft can finally claim I wrote something positive about their mobile OS. Windows Phone 7 Series is a bold re-imagining of Windows Mobile which I have previously described as nothing less than a “car wreck hitting a train wreck getting hit by jumbo jet.” However, in analyzing Microsoft’s new strategy we see they have implicitly ceded defeat on the original Windows Mobile strategy. This has some very interesting ramifications I have not read about anywhere else, so I thought I would point them out.

If you want a good write up concerning the advancements in WP7S, Ars Technica has a great summary here. But, what interests me most about WP7S was never announced and probably never will be.

Windows Mobile = Windows…but Mobile
So the story goes that Microsoft defeated Apple in the desktop OS market because Apple stuck too rigidly to a command & control system of defining all hardware and software. Bill Gates came in and democratized everything allowing anything to work with anything. (Freedom rules! O’Doyle Rules!) The evil, all black wearing, communist Steve Jobs was handily defeated in the Great Operating System War (aka The First World Operating System War).

As the world evolved and mobile devices came to market, Microsoft pushed on with its democratic, diverse hardware platform strategy and ported it directly to these new waves of mobile devices. This is evident from the various names of these mobile operating system incarnations: Windows CE, Windows PocketPC (Windows…in your pocket!!!) and of course Windows Mobile. These attempts were all aimed at putting Windows on a mobile phone–Start button, task manager, windows file explorer and all–the whole shebang.

Why would mobile phones be any different than computers? Until today, Microsoft publicly believed that this is how the world should work: Microsoft makes the operating system and myriad device manufacturers compete from Texas to Taiwan to make dazzling devices with the most differentiation sporting the most megahertz and most whizbang features to lure consumers. (And we see this in how WinMo devices are marketed: They are marketed like computers: “You should buy this WinMo phone because it has a XXXMHz Snapdragon processor and XXXMB of memory!” Oooo! Ahhhh!)

Only problem? As it turns out, Windows in your pocket is a terrible idea. Why? I realize this may be hard to grasp–it’s exceedingly subtle (at least it was in Redmond for a decade): mobile phones are not desktops nor even laptops; they are mobile phones.

iPhoneOS ≠ OS X Mobile

Attack!!!

Until the iPhone was released, the mobile software world was a horrid shantytown of squalor, JAMDAT and diarrhea. No single mobile OS had a rich enough user experience or had enough market share for development to be worthwhile and hardware differed so much from phone to phone that entire businesses were made out of customizing mobile games into tens of thousands of individual SKUs (I should know; I looked at investing in a few such businesses).

A Turning Point
But now we are coming to the turning point in the war. We are 25 years after the first graphical version of Windows on the desktop.  It is becoming apparent even to Billy G. and Stevey B. that quality assurance with an unlimited number of hardware devices and an unlimited number of peripherals, all requiring unlimited numbers of software drivers means, well…infinity plus one combinations of possible devices for Windows to reside on…and that makes producing really tight software quite hard. Windows grew ever larger just to meet the minimum requirements of supporting this infinite universe of hardware and software and soon began to sag and eventually crash under its own weight faster than the Warsaw Radio Mast. We have a name for this tragedy: Windows Vista.

WP7S ≠ Windows 7 Mobile
Today Microsoft announced Windows Phone 7 Series and simultaneously 1) gave itself a decent shot at reclaiming major market share in the mobile OS and 2) conceded defeat of its core strategy by implicitly admitting that the “Freedom Rules!” lessons of the desktop do not apply to the mobile phone. As Ars Technica states:

“[WP7S relative to WinMo], however, is considerably less customizable, and the hardware requirements are much, much tighter…In fact, pretty much the only optional feature is whether to have a hardware keyboard or not…Software-wise, there will only be one version, with none of the variants that its predecessor had.”

Thus, Microsoft was able to save its mobile OS, but only by adopting tactics from the enemy. While this may have been “OK” to do for the limited world of the Xbox, this is quite a big deal for the mobile OS, which easily represents half or more of the future OS opportunity. Microsoft has ditched the large, open, hairy, wooly, unfettered, laissez-faire capitalism of both Windows and Windows Mobile for the carefully regulated, post-modern compromise that is WP7S.

And I toast Microsoft for it! That’s why WP7S works. That’s why it’s promising! And what next? If Microsoft is able to stick to this strategy, we may see a D-Day face off between Microsoft and Apple.

But will Microsoft ever adopt such a rational and post-modern view of Windows on the desktop, combining both a tightly regulated vision with some room for outside vendors? I certainly hope so.

Addendum on Product Naming
Windows Phone 7 Series…or was that Windows 7: Phone Series? Or Windows Phone Series 7? Really? I mean, really ? That was the best name you could come up with? The whole point of this new OS is that it is NOT “Windows 7 in your pocket.” I understand you want to benefit from the wave of positive press and enthusiasm Windows 7 is receiving, but this is short-sighted. It’s a mouthful and the order of the words is confusing. I am not saying I immediately have a better alternative, but then again I haven’t spent any time thinking about. If I happen to find a seven figure check in the mail from Redmond, I’ll start working on it. My guess is they come up with a better name or at least a more consumer friendly moniker before official launch.

[Ed: Of course, as my friend Lucas points out this is all in principle at least. WP7S is supposed to arrive by "holiday season 2010" which puts it just this side of what many would call vaporware. iPhone 4.0 will likely be 33-50% dead already and iPhone 5.0 will be 50% alive by the time consumers get their first taste of WP7S-an eternity in mobile OS time.]