Device Wars! Like tolerating a relationship for a "Sugar Daddy"
What do you think? Does Windows Mobile 5.0 have a chance near-term against the Blackberry? I don't! After a couple months of 5.0 I'm longing for a Blackberry again (ain't happening though). I could depend on my Blackberry. I never had to think "is something wrong and I'm not getting e-mails because of a bug". Further, the Blackberry was just super easy to use. One-handed, running to catch a flight, it worked. Stepping out of a plane, turning it on, it worked. Attaching and detaching it from your computer...it WORKED. This is the killer feature of Blackberry. 5.0 just misses on the little things. There's no "You had me at hello" with 5.0. There's a constant feeling of "we have to work this out" and "we need to talk" when using 5.0. This is not how to gain market share. Force-feeding the technology will probably be the path MS takes to get market share. 6.0 will probably be better but there's a lot of alignment necessary between tons of little things which is a ways off. My partners and I differ in our opinion on this but they are not former Blackberry users. These are people who went right to 5.0 having never experienced the Blackberry. If I were MS, this would be my strategy. Don't try to convert people but get those who simply don't know how easy a Blackberry is to use on 6.0 when it arrives. I could foresee really cheap devices, i.e. a price-strategy to get people on their platform. If you save a couple hundred bucks with one versus the other, you'll deal with the annoyance of sub-par technology. At some point, there's no going back due to the outlay for the back-end technology. Near to mid-term I believe MS will win but it's going to take longer than most people think.