Microsoft just announced at the 2008 Mobile World Congress that it will be acquiring Danger Inc., the company who created and supports the popular Sidekick range of handhelds offered by T-Mobile. Microsoft’s current mobile offering, Windows Mobile 6 (both Professional and Standard) is often slammed for being too ‘businessy’, with a bigger focus on the enterprise user and not enough multimedia/consumer-friendly features.
This makes total sense to me. Microsoft’s OS currently sucks for consumers, compared to multimedia- and consumer-friendly Symbian OS and more recently, RIM’s Blackberry OS and the iPhone. Rather than attempt to overhaul their OS, which is rumored to not be updated fully until 2009, they’re simply going to buy Yahoo! and Danger, both top-level for mobile consumer-friendly services and products.
Genius. Completely genius. Just hope they don’t screw it up.
genius? are you serious? sure, its the right thing to do, and i know it’s tough to find ANYTHING to applaud microsoft for, but lets not go overboard – microsoft purchased the vast majority of its technology, this is just their modus operandi.
genius? realizing one’s limitations is more profound than some people realize, but it’s a far cry from genius.
I think it’s genius because Danger has a wealth of information as to the mobile practices and preferences of the young connected crowd, and has created a server-based system for delivering them content that they eat up. Personally, I’m surprised no other company snapped them up quicker, to be honest.
Ricky’s last blog post..Vodafone chooses Blackberry as key standard
fair enough – i suppose i’ll give you “acting before anyone else did” as a more meaningful act than simply “buying up another tech company” as i took it for. still, i think we’ll have to see what the big boys do with their new toys before declaring much in the way of mental clarity. personally, i’m hoping for something to come out of that company that piques my interest. i’ve got nothing against monopolies – AT&T was once like microsoft is today, but during that time they gave (really, GAVE) us the transistor. where is microsoft’s big contribution? another tech buy-out. if they use Danger to do something really clever i’ll be proud of them – i hope they do, they are quite overdue.
[…] is having a stormer of a Mobile World Congress. After announcing its decision to buy the software company Danger, hot on the heels of its play for Yahoo, it’s dusting down its consumer effort for mobiles […]