To read most of the coverage from afar, Microsoft did an excellent job of messaging that 2012 could be a big year for WindowsPhone 7. As one piece puts it:

There’s a curious thing happening in the smartphone space at this year’s CES. Two Windows Phone devices — the HTC Titan II and the Nokia Lumia 900 — are the most hyped, talked-about phones at the show. Yeah, that’s right: Windows Phones.

From what I can tell, I’m one of the few people who’s used two WP7 phones over the past year: a Samsung Focus (sent to me by Microsoft for reviewing while I was RedMonk) and a Dell VenuePro (my current “work phone”). They’re both beyond just fine: they’re good phones in hardware and operating system. The core problem they have is a lack of apps, specifically, the apps I already use and like in iOS-land.

Anchored by Apps

There are, it should be said, lots of apps for WP7 (30,000+ back in August…but, compare that to 500,000+ in iOS-land). The problem is that they don’t have the apps I want to use, specifically, all those iOS apps I’ve spent money on over the years. As Ed pointed out to me awhile ago, the annoying catch here is that, even if the pay apps I wanted were in WP7…I’d have to pay for them again. And, with estimates of 60 apps downloaded per iOS device, that’s a lot of apps people need to take with them. Of course, this is just the case when you switch between Windows and Mac (or Mac and Windows): a license for Office or Creative Suite in Windows won’t translate from Windows to Mac.

Thankfully, most mobile apps are cheap – much cheaper than desktop Office ($119) or Creative Suite (from $280 to $1,500, or so). In reality, I make enough money that I’d pay for the apps twice. But, they don’t always exist in the first place. Indeed, many of the apps I depend on in iOS land aren’t (or weren’t last time I looked) available in WP7-land: Flipboard (hands down my most used app), EchoFon, even an official tumblr app.

For WP7 to be successful, Microsoft needs to ride all of those app authors to create WP7 versions of their apps. The same is true for Windows 8 – where, at least, Microsoft already has one of the world’s most important “apps,” Office (important as in “the [army|company|etc.] runs off [PowerPoint|Excel]“). App vendors like Evernote have a good track record of going balls out here, and I’ve seen a handful of apps developed for WP7 that are more than just quick ports: they take advantage of the tiles, integrating into the sharing functionality through-out the phone, and so on. It’s got to be tough for an app vendor, though: supporting iOS, Android, and WP7 is a hefty bought to sign up for.

HTML5 is good for who exactly?

Arguably, “HTML5 fixes this,” but I’d argue that each platform vendor (Apple, Google, Microsoft) is just barely incented to make HTML5 as good as their native app frameworks. What we’re discussing here is a major point of customer lock-in, thus, a major element of any mobile/tablet strategy. Each of these “post-PC” platforms (iOS, Android, WP7, and Windows 8) needs to differentiate on the entire platform experience – HTML5, really, takes away the ability of any OS to be different. If I can simply take all my “apps” (written in HTML5 so that they’re really web apps or web apps that I download a la Tiddlywiki to my mobile “desktop”) with me when I go…there’s little reason to stick to one mobile platform: I just skip around to the one that has the beast hardware and network. (Imagine if you actually selected a device because of the carrier’s QoS!)

Don’t get me wrong: as a user, I’d love my apps to be cross-platform and achieve that HTML5 nirvana existed and I could just take my apps with me from platform to platform. But that’d make these “smart phones” into “dumb phones,” which is definitely not anything the mobile platform creators are looking to do. On the other hand, I’d suggest that the cross-platform dreams of HTML5 suite just about everyone else’s interests: the app makers would be available on everyone’s devices, the handset makers would avoid this whole app lock-in problem, and the carriers could differentiate on service instead of platform exclusiveness. Historically, the platform providers tend to win out because they’re willing to play the long game of locking users into awesomeness, while the other parties go for quick wins quarter to quarter. We’ll see if it pans out differently this time.

Check out Barton George‘s quick interview with Matt Ray while he was visiting yesterday. See the original post for some notes and links.

He also explained that rapid releases help Google to introduce “gradual, gentle” upgrades over time, which makes the browser update process easier for users. Ruel walked around the still controversial automated browser update feature, but hinted that users value convenience and don’t want to be bothered with unnecessary system messages, or system restarts after installation. As long as the software update remains convenient for the user, Google apparently believes that the automated update is seen as a benefit by users. –Google Details Successes of its Chrome Release Process

Over the years, the whole release often thing has had one constant counter-argument: users don’t want updates that frequently. They like stability, and all that.

Gradually, as in the above, frequent upgrades have become a functional feature rather than just marketing – classically, you put out upgrades to get people to spend more money on the new version of your software.

But when the software is free (and you monetize some service, like ads in Google’s case), upgrades become a way to keep people in your ecosystem. Having frequent update becomes a differentiator, not a hassle.

It’s panel promotion time for SXSW 2010. This year, I’m going for a panel on selling to the enterprise, targeted at the SXSW crowd, of course. I thought this would be a fun contrast to the consumer-heavy, “free” stuff that the SXSW sessions and panels are usually full of. The best way to “monetize” is to get paid for what you do and sell, to put it one way.

You can help by voting for the panel and leaving a comment, I’d appreciate it!

Here’s the proposal:

Avoid Freeloaders, Go For The Enterprise Gold

Why cater to a market that makes you eat ramen when you can slap on a suit and get budget for sushi? In this panel industry analyst Michael Coté (RedMonk) will lead a discussion with other analysts and experts illustrating how to approach enterprises and large gold-holding organizations with your technologies and services. Selling to consumers is fun, but the pay is poor compared to corporate customers who actually would like to pay for good software. We’ll cover the exceptions these outfits have, what types of technologies they’re looking for, sales processes, pricing, deflecting FUD from incumbents, and other aspects to help you bootstrap into the enterprise market. If you’re just holed up in an apartment waiting to get bought by Facebook or Google, there’s nothing for you here. But if you’d like to find out what all those dry-cleaned people are doing, come check it out and ask questions.

Questions Answered

1. What types of functionality are enterprises looking for?
2. How do I get around barriers put in by competitors and people who fear change?
3. What advantages do new startups and offerings have that they can take advantage of?
4. How do I build a sales and market program to reach enterprises?
5. What technologies and services are low-hanging fruit?

While on a bus at some IBM function, I cooked up this idea with fellow analyst Merv Adrian – he’ll be on the panel (it was actually one of my many schemes to get more people to come to Austin for SXSW). Also, I was excited that Austin’s Kenny Van Zant volunteered to be on the panel in Twitter. As one of the long-time, senior executive at Solarwinds, he has first hand experience going after this kind of sell, but through the web instead of the usual steaks-and-strippers channels.

If that sounds interesting, it’d help get us closer to acceptance if you voted and left a comment for the panel. Hopefully we’ll see you at SXSW in March!

Charles asked me to think of some ways you’d use sandboxed JavaScript on the server side – I jump right in with some examples:

To listen to the episode, subscribe to the podcast feed in iTunes or whatever, download the episode directly, or click play below to listen right here:

We’ll see if any of it helps Charles out with his talk.

To listen to the episode, subscribe to the podcast feed in iTunes or whatever, download the episode directly, or click play below to listen right here:

In this two episodes in one episodes, Charles and I embed an episode of RIA Weekly into an episode of DrunkAndRetired.com. It’s like a taco in a hamburger wrapped in a slice of pizza.

Here’s a brief summary:

• Detroit’s motto is actually “Speramus Meliora; Resurget Cineribus”, which means “We Hope For Better Things; It Shall Rise From the Ashes” in English.
• Check out The Bladerunner game FAQ I wrote long ago.
• Charles gives his love to DonkeyTron 5000.
• Since both of us have heard the NPR coverage of Detroit this week, I (re-)ask Charles, “what’s up with Detroit?”
• This gets us into a discussion of the villains plans to tear down the old city and build a new one in movies like Darkman, Robocop, and Bruce Sterling’s recent book The Caryatids, which I give a brief overview of.
• Don’t forget Charles’ upcoming talk at the Ann Arbor JUG! Charles will try to address Pete F.’s desire for a recording.
• Charles discusses his concept for “TwitterDick.com,” that is, seeing how much social media ego you have.
• This leads us to propose the DrunkAndRetired.com Listener Market Research Omnibus Survey. Want to participate, just tell us!
• For a detailed summary for the RIA Weekly episode, see the RIA Weekly #49 show-notes.

Charles has been developing and giving a talk on using JavaScript over the past few months. He gave it up at the Detroit Java User Group, and it looks like he’ll be giving it at the Ann Arbor Java User Group next week, Tuesday April 28th. Charles has been perfecting the “every-day” use of JavaScript for awhile, as you know if you’ve been listening to the podcast, and this talk is a good sum-up of all that work and knowledge.

Here’s the summary:

Charles Lowell will show why JavaScript is like no other major language when it comes to embedding into an application. Drawing from personal experience, Charles will present a treatment of the JavaScript object system and philosophy.

He will demonstrate how to use JavaScript to implement a scriptable webservice and demonstrate the ability to add and remove properties to native java objects and classes.

I posted this episode to the feed last week, but didn’t have time to post here. So, here it is!

In this episode, while I’m State-side, Charles is still in Finland. Thus, we start out talking about the wood-burning sauna he’s been using. We then jump into a discussion of Chrome, and then I float the theory that there’s major cracks in the dominance of web-only UIs – what with RIAs and the iPhone.

We wrap up with a special production from Charles.