QUOTE:

"Microsoft sold more than 18 million licenses in fiscal year 2008 for its Windows Mobile software. Internationally, the company saw triple digit gains in France, Latin America, Central and Eastern Europe, Japan and India.

Apple's much-publicized App Store is closing in on having a thousand applications available for download, while Microsoft says there are now more than 18,000 Windows Mobile applications. And for business users, recent additions have come from such blue chips as Bloomberg, Reuters, and SAP."

Will Open Source force MS to change their License fee? OR will they have to re-think the way they do business?

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Microsoft could certainly tap into Mobile Goldrush as long as it stops looking back and always taking backward compatibility into consideration in certain areas where most people won't mind. Windows Mobile is based on the Windows CE platform and boy is it bloated with backward compatibility functions that limits the platform's evolution and washes numerous creative ideas down the drain.

As we have touched on this before, people want a one stop shop for all Windows Mobile applications. And if Microsoft will be ditching Windows CE for it's next gen Windows Mobile, then we should see a different approach being taken in developing and delivering those applications.

Here is a thought: Imagine building the next gen of Windows Mobile around WPF (Windows Presentation Foundation) instead of using the usual Windows Forms. I mean, WPF has been around for a while now and it opens up a new world when it comes to developing software specially on the user interface level. It sounds like a perfect way to compete with the other fruity devices out there

Here are some WPF examples for Windows. I personally love the Tangerine WPF application (works for Vista, might require additional downloads to work on XP). Imagine the same experience but as a Windows Mobile OS instead.

I think that backwards compatability is something which will have to remain.

One of our strong selling points for Windows Mobile is the 18,000+ third party apps availble. If we remove backwards compatabilty we will lose the entire back catalogue. Vista has shown us that backwards compatability is essential for the existing customer base. I have programs from as far back as WM2003 which work perfectly on my WM6 device and which I would sorely miss on any new version.

There are a far too many apps which are no longer in development which would not be updated if we switched the Windows Mobile platform to something completely new.

A cross platform which keeps the 18,000 strong catalogue while opening new options through Silverlight for Windows Mobile and WPF would allow a rich experience to develop while retaining the functionality which makes Windows Mobile so valuable to the enterprise model.