Microsoft enters the Smartphone market

There was much speculation as to whether Microsoft would make the leap into the smartphone market. It’s a market already dominated by huge name brands such as Apple with its iPhone, and Google with Android. However, as of October 21 2010, Microsoft have entered the smartphone market with the release of the Windows Phone 7, which was launched in Europe and Australasia.

Coming so late to the market represents a great risk for Microsoft. With two huge brands in the guise of Apple and Google already firmly established, it’s not going to be easy to squeeze market share. Perhaps its saving grace is the fact that Microsoft is also a huge brand in its own right, just not in the smartphone market. However, entering the smartphone market also represents a great opportunity. Microsoft will have to work very hard if it wants to become the third major player. To do that it will have to leapfrog HP with its Palm Pre and Blackberry.

It’s also refreshing to note that Microsoft haven’t simply copied Apple and Google with its user-interface, but instead have developed something completely different.

As should be fairly obvious, to be successful in the smartphone market isn’t entirely about just the phones. To be successful you need to have lots of great, cool apps! You also need social media integration so users can keep up to date with their friends on Twitter, Facebook and so on. So the challenge for Microsoft is to have a simple user-interface so that users can navigate their way around their smartphone applications, and a feature rich / well documented API (Applications Programming Interface) to allow developers to write all their cool applications for it.

The Windows Phone 7 application development will be based on Silverlight, Xbox New Architecture (XNA) and the .NET Compact Framework 4.0. These are all technologies that will be familiar to a Microsoft based developer.

It will also use Microsoft technologies such as Bing for its web searching, and have gaming integration with Xbox.

It will be critical for the success of the Windows Phone 7 that it comes with a multitude of applications at launch, and with many more scheduled to come soon after. The quality of those applications needs to be fantastically high, given the massive head start of the competition. It has a lot of catching up to do if it seriously wants to challenge Apple and Google, or rather leapfrog HP and Blackberry. Those applications need to be cheap (preferably free), stable, simple to use and brought to the market as soon as possible (but without breaking the stability already mentioned).

It will be interesting to see how Microsoft fares in such a highly competitive and well dominated market. The coming months should reveal if the decision to move into such a market was the right one or not.

A word of caution using third party social media tools

Third party social media tools can be a double edged sword. On the one hand they get you up and running quickly, with little or zero up front expenses, and little if any technical knowledge. On the other hand, you are placing your content in the hands of a third party supplier without the benefit of a contract to safe guard yourself.

Google's blogging tool Blogger (used by me on this very blog) recently closed down several music sites without warning, and thus not giving the user any time to backup their blog. All the blogs that Google closed were operating legitimately under Blogger's own Terms and Conditions.

Google is not alone in closing down sites in this way. Yahoo closed down its photo hosting service back in July 2007, giving its users only three months to claim their photos before Yahoo purged the site.

While these sorts of actions may be rare, they still cause a great deal of frustration and inconvenience when they do. So it is worth asking yourself the question "How would I recreate my online social media presence if my social media supplier withdrew its services?"

Whether you host your own social media applications or not, your social media content should be backed up. In the event of a disaster, you should be able to recover your content back to its previous state, whether you do this using the original social media tool or not.

If you are using the Google Blogger tool (like I do), then you can export your blog directly from within the blog editor (once logged in, go to Settings and the option for exporting your blog is at the top). Most blog editors will have a similar feature.

Also, you can save the raw XML feed from your blog. To save the latest 1000 feeds for my own blog I would need to enter http://www.domburf.blogspot.com/feeds/posts/default?max-results=1000 into my browser.

So it's worth investigating what facilities your social media tool has for allowing you to backup your content.

And don't delay, do it today!

Creating my personal web site - finishing touches

Following on from my blog about creating my personal web site, there were still a few things left to do. Just to refresh all your memories, this is my personal web site.

Firstly, I needed to let people know about my web site. It would have been a shame to have gone to all the trouble of creating and deploying it, only for it to not have any visitors. So I emailed my family and friends, sent out an email at work, updated my Facebook status and sent out a tweet on Twitter. I have so far received quite positive feedback from the people who have navigated to my web site.

Secondly, I needed to let the major search engines know of its existence. To do this, I submitted the web page's URL (Uniform Resource Locator - otherwise known as its web address) to Google and Yahoo. This let's your web site get listed when appropriate search words are entered into the search engine. To do this, use the following links:

Google www.google.com/addurl.html
Yahoo submit.search.yahoo.com

This adds your web site to the list of web sites that the search engines will crawl. After initial URL submission, your web site should be crawled within 48 hours. Your web site will be crawled from thereafter. I have also added the URL for this blog to the search engines.

To see what traffic your web site is generating, where your visitors have come from, and what referrals your web site has, you can use any of the web site traffic tools that are available. I have registered my web site and blog with Sitemeter. This is one of the more popular site traffic tools, and is also free. There is a more advanced option for which you have to pay, but the free option is good enough for my purposes. Again, I have also added my blog to the tool so I monitor my blog traffic.

With my web site and blog setup, configured, registered with the search engines and the tools for me to monitor their traffic, all I need to do now is keep the content up to date!