Microsoft CEO Promises Faster Windows Mobile Updates

Steve Ballmer has promised his company is working hard to remedy one of the biggest complaints about Windows Mobile: the slow pace of updates.

Microsoft is up against strong competition from consumer-oriented smartphones from Apple and Google, and an IT manager yesterday asked Microsoft's CEO during a Q&A session about how he could deal with these devices. Because they aren't business-oriented, they don't offer enterprise-class security. Windows Mobile phones do, but many of the IT manager's users want an iPhone or a similar model.

Ballmer responded by saying that his company is picking up the pace in Windows Mobile development,  

There are opportunities for us to accelerate our execution in this area. We've done a lot of work to make sure we have a team that will be able to accelerate it.

Microsoft focused Windows Mobile on business users for many years, because they were the majority of smartphone buyers. Now that these devices are popular with consumers, Microsoft is faced with the task of modifying this operating system to make it more appealing to this new group.

The Challenge of Variety
The Microsoft chief executive went on to say that part of the challenge in updating Windows Mobile is the wide variety of phone designs it supports:

In general, I'll make the argument that having diversity of form factor serves the broadest set of the population. The question is, how simple can we make it to write an application that runs in multiple modalities.

According to Ballmer, Microsoft's solution to this is to create several classes of designs, and be sure that Windows Mobile works as well as it can with each class.

This seems to be in line with a previous unconfirmed report, which indicated that Microsoft is creating a collection of smartphone reference designs. Licensees will be encouraged to use these designs as the basis for future models.

Via PC World