Microsoft's unrelenting effort to populate iOS and Android with its apps is beginning to look less like a desperate migration and more like precision integration.
The advent of consumer-facing smartphones and app ecosystems began changing the face of computing over a decade ago. No longer are Windows PCs the average consumer's primary computing device. iPhones and Android phones with touch-centric UIs, apps, constant-connectivity, and ultra-mobility are the world's most "personal computers."
Microsoft realized, perhaps too late, the importance of apps and a consumer-friendly mobile UI and platform. In 2010, continuing an existing Windows-on-phone strategy, Microsoft revamped its mobile OS. It also strove to intertwine its mobile and desktop ecosystems via a Universal Windows Platform (UWP). It hoped to leverage its Windows PC install base strength to help build an app ecosystem that would buttress Windows-on-phones (while its sights were set on a Windows-on-mobile strategy beyond smartphones). Sadly, Microsoft's smartphone efforts failed miserably.
Still, during the height of Windows-on-phone's struggles and in the wake of its decline Microsoft aggressively seeded iOS and Android with a plethora of first-party apps. It saw a presence on successful mobile platforms as better than no presence at all. Though a first-party mobile device and platform are paramount making rival phones "Microsoft phones" via a continual migration of apps is a reasonable Plan B or something more. Microsoft's Windows PC personal computing legacy trained the company to provide a comprehensive OS, software and OEM partnership computing solution when computing was limited to desktop PCs. The company's ambitions remain unchanged in a personal computing landscape where the OS is now the cloud, its software is cross-platform and device agnostic, and Surface pushes OEM partners to higher standards. Given computing's evolution, Microsoft's cross-platform efforts would have likely evolved in its current direction even if Windows-on-phone's succeeded though perhaps with less outside criticism and internal urgency.
Full story from the WindowsCentral blog...
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