Mobile Operating system trends: "Windows Mobile and Symbian are emerging as the operating systems of choice as large companies bring multimedia applications down to phones and handhelds."
"Windows Mobile has a lot of momentum, with the 3G compatibility and devices that have both 3G and Wi-Fi," Jaquet said. In addition, Sling Media was already working very closely with Microsoft in developing its applications for Windows PCs, so it was already familiar with the Windows Media Player, he said.
Google chose to develop its Google Maps for Mobile application in Java so it could run on as many devices as possible, said Deep Nishar, director of product management for Google.
OS works as an interface between applications and hardware. It plays the role of distribution/control "default routing" for applications and provides a control point wrt evolution of applications/innovation on a particular platform.
Microsoft is trying hard to position its mobile OS as a
platform of choice for software developers. It's an evolutionary approach: the more applications the greater the chances that somebody will come up with a hit.
Tags: distribution control points interfaces mobile
2 comments:
I understand what you mean by "evolutionary approach", but not how it applies in this context. This refers to the last sentence in the entry.
-v
Microsoft wants lots of applications available for their OS platform. The more applications, the greater the chances that somebody comes up with a hit. This is the first stage of the evolutionary approach: if you don't know what is going to succeed in a certain environment, try a lot of things, and see which one of them gets selected, e.g becomes a hit. It's called "spaghetti principle": through lots of spaghetti on the wall and see what sticks.
When a hit is found Microsoft wants to distribute it as widely as possible, because it makes their platform more useful for people. Sometimes they make a deal with the original authors, but often they just implement their own "improved" versions, e.g. web browser, media player, instant messenger, etc. Microsoft uses its OS updates/upgrades as a distribution vehicle to deliver hit applicaitons to consumers as a package. This makes OS upgrade worth its while.
As the OS installed base grows, software and hardware manufacturers find it more attractive to develop new versions of their products to run on Microsoft OSs. Some of them become hits, and the cycle repeats.
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