Microsoft Mobile Under Seige?

In the last 1 week, Microsoft Mobile is finding itself battered and hounded.

First, the Windows Mobile got a response which could only be compared to Microsoft Vista in terms of the catatrosphically disastrous reviews - the most damaging one from Mobilecrunch, which, to quote, says:

Windows Mobile 6.5 is a spit and polish job on 6.1 — nothing more, nothing less. Every single change in Windows Mobile 6.5 feels like it was made by a team of homebrewers or modders, rather than a huge corporation with truckloads of money to blow on one of their flagship products.

And of course, the disastrous Sidekick upgrade and the wordplay on Microsoft and Danger is overwhelming.

All this might perhaps, finally, make Steve Ballmer (and of course, the Windows Mo) quit and in fuse young blood that might yet make Microsoft more relevant in these changing times of Cloud Computing, SaaS and internet based technologies, where Microsoft has been lagging for quite a while. {It was quite interesting to see Ballmer play the Google's Anonymity and Underplay card when questioned on Windows 7 during his EU Trip}

Microsoft's success in the 80's and 90's came from the fact that they were what Google is now - a company which consistently tossed up good products, with a sound financial platform and of course, one of the best talent pools in the world. The talent and the financial platform still lives on, but the new and innovative products have died out. In the last 10 years, I can count only 2 success stories - Windows XP (which was really a milestone) and Bing (take the Bing ads with a pinch of salt, however). Perhaps make a younger person, who, might be able to make decisions to move the company in the right direction - I don't want to see the Motorola story happen once again to a company which I'd like to see exist in an meaningful manner for more years to come.

The Search War is ON!

So after redesigning the Microsoft Live (I have to accept that they made a nice idea of those pictures), Microsoft is trying to beat the God of Search Engines with Bing. Bing from the promotional video seems to be a more advanced version of the Google Suggest and a few other google features already existent. But given the desperation levels of Microsoft to better Google, you can be sure that they have something up their sleeve - which leads us to the next question - What is Google going to do? Its not by luck alone that they are the most successful Internet based company in the last 20 odd years. And remember that they contributed their company name as a verb to the english language.

Sabaash! Seriyaana poatti!!

Another take, albeit by a much more professional person.

Apple v. Microsoft

I'm not a big fan of the series of ads run by Apple where they supposedly spoof Bill Gates. I have never seen an ad from Apple where they have just said what is good them - they have to include the bit about what is bad with MS Windows/MS and then say that they have a better version of that functionality. If Windows was that sucky, then 80 percent of the world would not be using that OS. And with the recent report that Firefox has had more patches/security updates than IE in the last year just shows that IE is not a poor browser by default, its just that those useless pieces of sh*t which write pop-up/malware/spyware write code to target the most used browser.

And with this piece of news , perhaps Apple can run that their browser/OS is so easy to use even for a hacker! Unimaginative Makkale, change your marketing tactics!!

Microsoft ups the ante....

Finally Microsoft seeks to dent Google's stranglehold on Internet based services. Google has already started Google Health . This gets interesting - much like Mortal Kombat. Already Yahoo! has been left to lick its wounds - its virtually Microsoft's Muscle against Google's perceived 'cool' factor.