Madness. Sheer Madness. No I am not talking about the murder mystery. I'm talking instead about the state of my life post full time employment. While still not able to share anything about what I am planning next, I can offer you this. Having a full time job is less busy and stressful than what my days have been like since. So, as I take a break from thinking about the next phase of my career in enterprise mobility, what better way to relax than to go read up on enterprise mobility. Yes people. I recognize the fact that I have no life.
As you might know (assuming you visit this little neck of the interweb regularly), I'm a frequent reader of the mobile blog at Information Week. Today, I read an interesting article by Eric Zeman where he suggests Microsoft should break legacy compatibility if it wants to build a strong future for the Windows Mobile platform.
In a black and white world, I absolutely agree with Eric. Unfortunately, we don't live in a black and white world.
We as consumers, we're OK with changing things on a regular basis. We change mobile devices every couple of years. Our home computers, we typically only keep maybe three years (I'm worse - maybe 18 months). Heck, arguably the most expensive durable good we purchase outside of a home - our cars - we so frequently lease for 36 months. As consumers, we're typically OK with the fact that things aren't backwards compatible. This is best evidenced by how Apple operates.
The problem is that, we as consumers do not operate the same way that big organizations do. They hold on to older systems as long as they can because of the fact that the cost of ripping and replacing something could potentially cost an arm and a leg...and maybe even your first born. That's why Microsoft for example typically provides support for products for 10 years after their initial entry into the market. Remember all the ruccus that came when they said they were going to stop supporting Windows XP?
There are thousands of legacy applications that run on "ancient" technology. Remember how 10 years ago, people with COBOL skills were in incredibly high demand to address the Y2K problem? Do you really think that kind of problem is gone? No way...
So what is Microsoft to do. Back to Zeman's comments. Agreed - build a new platform that leverages only the latest and greatest technologies. .Net CF, Visual Studio 2010, Flash (ha ha), etc. Break free from your legacy ball and chain. Build however an emulator or compatibility system for Windows Mobile 7. Let companies adapt to your new methods when they are ready to. You are not Apple to make people think it's a good thing when you have to rip and replace. Speaking of Apple....you could learn from how they did things. Remember when they went to MacOS X? They created the Classic environment. What about when they switched from PowerPC to Intel processors? They had Rosetta.
Microsoft. You need your own Rosetta. Do that...make the performance hit as minimal as possible and then tout the heck out of your all new platform and work with your amazing partner ecosystem to have them speak on your behalf as to why companies should leverage the new tools and abandon the legacy.
Now just make sure WinMo 7 can multi-task please ;-)
