With only a slight nod toward business clients during the launch of Microsoft’s latest mobile-phone operating system this week, CEO Steve Ballmer fueled speculation that the software giant wants a bigger slice of the consumer pie.
Speaking at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, Spain, on Wednesday, Ballmer devoted most of his 70-minute presentation on the rebranded Windows Phone 7 Series — no longer called Windows Mobile — to social-media compatibility, games and other features, highlighting live tiles that transform dormant icons into dynamic displays. He also showcased the hubs for people, pictures, games, music and video.
Tech bloggers and analysts were quick to note that Ballmer spent just more than two minutes highlighting the features that have made Windows Mobile the second biggest operating system for enterprise users. Windows Mobile is second only to Research In Motion’s BlackBerry operating system, but losing ground to Apple’s iPhone among corporate customers.
“A lot of their tweaks and adjustments and added-value proposition are definitely geared toward new consumers,” said Ramon Llamas, a senior mobile-devices analyst at IDC. “If you want to be competitive in this market and follow where the growth is, it’s outside of the enterprise user.”
But that’s not to say Microsoft is abandoning business users, he stressed.
“I still think [those users] will find quite a bit of value in what Windows 7 can do in terms of being connected to the business and having access in a lot of back-end services and documents and contacts and such,” Llamas said. “That part does not go away.”
But stopping the momentum of Apple’s iPhone, the single most popular handset on the market today, means maximizing a “seamless” user interface that doesn’t take time to master.
“This iteration of Windows 7 puts Microsoft more on par with Apple, Palm and Google, where the…