From Steve Ballmer’s speech on November 4, 2009, I found Microsoft is very clear about the trend of cloud computing and how television, mobiles, and personal computer would be integrated to this trend. While Microsoft is the first company among these three to touch into the mobile market, its early vision seems doesn’t help it even to stay in this market. A recent article published in WSJ Blog by Jeanette Borzo claims that Microsoft Has No Plans to make another Smartphone, according to Microsoft executives.
Microsoft is going to stick to core businesses and has no plans to develop a new Smartphone device, such as its ill-starred Kin handsets, the chief financial officer of Microsoft’s mobile-communication business said Thursday. While Apple is enjoying its huge success of the latest iPhone 4 and Google’s Android operating system continues to win popularity with consumers, Microsoft seems still didn’t show how it will deal with mobile market and how to save the windows mobile system. It is the similar case for its Bing and Live services. Even though both of these attempts show Microsoft’s resolution to compete with Google on cloud services, their strategy is much less clear than Google or even Apple. Microsoft claims to stick to its core business, but maybe that's not enough for it to compete with Google.
Not creating a device is the right way to go for Microsoft currently, specially if they haven't figure out a winner strategy. However, the question on where to focus is critical and the clock is ticking. Microsoft is not used to play second and now they are not the leaders in a space the used to own, this is operative systems. The question is should they play catch up and fight with their Windows Mobile against Android (which is free!!) or turn their strategy towards applications for instance?
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