What Microsoft did wrong with Windows Phone OS (or why it’s not ready for the enterprise)

My previous post talked about a lot of the good that I see in Microsoft’s work to create a Mobile Phone OS but with everything that they set forth they still had very disappointing sales. Microsoft seems very confident that Nokia will help pull them out of the rut that they are in but with almost 1% of the Smartphone market that is a lot of work for Nokia to help with even with all the ad dollars that Microsoft is planning on providing.

Microsoft decided to pull a page out of Apple’s book when they released their first WP7 phone, they were going to sell to consumers and the way they were going to do that was by linking their phone to the Xbox. If you had an Xbox you must want this phone, which let you see your scores, participate in message boards and have a great avatar. Of course, as we well know, Microsoft miscalculated. They had practically no apps in their app store, most people who had an Xbox already had a smartphone, and their in-store promotions really didn’t work very well. If you walked into a Verizon or AT&T store they weren’t trying to hawk a Windows Phone, it was the latest Android handset or else the iPhone. Why would you want something that really couldn’t do much and most people didn’t here about.

Microsoft’s next step was to try and hawk it to the Enterprise. They had included an Exchange client in the OS as well as some SharePoint and Office hooks. What more could an enterprise want than that in their phone. As they learnt very quickly, none of these things mattered to the Enterprise. The Enterprise was looking for a phone that they could secure. Something that, if it was going to replace the Blackberry, had encryption and could use certificates and the like. None of these were included in the first release from Microsoft. Although they may disagree, it was supremely focused on the consumer.

I had high hopes, when late in the spring, Microsoft held their developer conference to talk about Mango – their next iteration of the OS. Here was something that I would be able to bring in to the company I work for. The rumors had been rife that Microsoft had fixed many of the issues with their Exchange client. They had deepened the hooks into corporate SharePoint and the office client was even better. They would of course be allowing more than a numerical pin (7.0 allowed a numerical pin only). The entire device would be encrypted. You would be able to use corporate wireless with hidden SSIDs and they would accept certificates to prove the device belonged to who it said it did.

Needless to say, while Microsoft improved many of the client capabilities and issues, they really didn’t address any of the security issues. “Why should we worry since the device has never been jailbroken/rooted?” was the refrain I heard from many Microsoft WP7 employees/evangelists. They didn’t like the retort “well you’ve only shipped a few. You haven’t broken any real market share, and no enterprise has taken you up yet.” This invariably led to a repeat of the first statement and wouldn’t it be great to have a Windows Phone for your users.

While I actually like the Windows Phone OS, When I consider it for the enterprise I still always think of it from the standpoint of one of my friends, James Urquhart, a fervent WP7 fan, who might actually wait in line one of these days for a “Disney Phone”