Emily Chang, the hardest working television host in technology business is back from her maternity leave. The new mom who hosts the Bloomberg West Show invited me to come and talk about Microsoft’s challenges and my love of Instagram, which remains undiminished despite the recent controversy over its terms of services. It was a fun chat. The key point I made: Steve Jobs might have had a reality distortion field, but Microsoft is living in a distorted reality and it needs to figure its future out – fast.
I agree, case in point is it’s reaction to Google’s decision to pull support for Activesync (which is proprietary – vendors pay Microsoft to license it). On both leading mobile platforms, Android and iOS, Google provides a more robust alternatives, both natively (using open standards, imap, caldav, carddav) and in the form of it’s own apps. Microsoft, with Windows mobile refuses to support those standards and forcing vendors to use it’s own Activesync. This strikes me as incredibly disingenuous.
Now, Activesync is quite an elegant protocol for syncing Mail, Calendar and Contacts. If Microsoft was genuinely concerned about users they would open up the protocol or at least support those open standards. In this case, however, they are jumping up and down over Google’s refusal to support this proprietary standard or build native apps for a platform that at last had 3.5% of the market.
This approach was “acceptable” in a world where Microsoft held a 97% marketshare (and therefore could set its own “standards”). The world has changed however, yet Microsoft is still living in its own distorted reality.
Great interview, Om!
Thanks
Nice to see Emily Chang back. Even better? Seeing Om on Bloomberg.
Lol, thanks Ed
And my wife likes your shirt.
Ed, Gingham always wins.