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Pocket PC: When a little is too much...
Thu, 10 Nov 2005

(And not just with brustle sprouts.) Without a doubt, Microsoft's Pocket PC platform is a solid workhorse sporting many components that developers can build upon to create powerful applications. A robust kernel with true multitasking... check. Gorgeous font rendering and high resolution displays... check. Wifi 802.11 and bluetooth both... check. Yadda yadda. The operating system rests upon inspired hardware such as the Dell Axim X50v... and yet I must wonder why there just seems to be so many fewer applications in each genre than in the Palm OS camp. (I am not saying the applications are any less functional -- merely less in population.)

Now now -- first, I must stand out and say that I do not believe one platform trumps the other as a class, though if you want push mail that perhaps RIM is really where you want to go :) The platforms really are overlapping quite a bit these days with much of the same software on both, or at least directly corresponding applications on both. And I'm not going to go into a I can jump further than you war about resolutions (with Palm having a higher average resolution, but Pocket PC having VGA option trumping everyone.) What I'm bringing up is the fertility of the landscape -- I've often wondered if Microsoft has accidentally suppressed the developers on the platform merely by including half-assed versions of applications in many necessary genres.

Of course there is Pocket Informant and Agenda Pro, and they do plenty well enough at replacing the built in PIMs, I grant you that. And TextMaker to replace Pocket Word. Sure, theres a few standouts that have pulled through somehow .. but can be counted on one hand. Microsoft has bundled in Pocket Word which is a nice overall product, except at its embarassing interaction with Office documents (the main objective of these PIMs one might add.) They've bundled in Pocket Internet Explorer, which is actually a pretty good web browser, but like its bigger desktop brother it hasn't grown much over the years (tabbed browsing for instance.) They've bundled in a card writer with ActiveSync's 'Explore' option, except that it performs some order of magnitude slower than a real Card Writer (just like Hotsync from PalmSource of course.)

At the same time, Microsoft did it right in a few areas, such as the Today screen -- providing an infrastructure to developers so they can expand on the concept and really enrich the user experience... which is why there are literally hundreds of handy plugins and doodads for the Today screen. Sure, they did a pretty darned good job with the other components, allowing developers to make use of parts of PIE in their own applications or to develope replacement web browsers, but the damage is done .. by including weaker core applications in many genres, they've made it hard for the third parties to come in and innovate, since they often won't get enough customers to back them.

Just to bring the rant full circle, I'll say that Microsoft is not alone.. our friends at PalmOne and the other licensees are all guilty of the same thing, though I'm not sure "guilt" is the right word since they're all just trying to help the consumer. Bundling Docs2Go (a very fine set of products I might add) with every Palm OS device pretty much nailed QuickOffice and WordSmith to the wall, eliminating a genre overnight.

So what is better .. to provide no applications, or to provide some bad ones, or to provide some great ones? Here I can provide no answer.

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