InFormalBrain

I must admit I have not been a big fan of Microsoft for some time now. They just haven't been creating much innovation in my mind.

But in the past couple of months I have seen some real innovation out of the software giant:

Take Windows 7 Phone:

"A phone is just not a PC. It's a smaller, more intimate device."

[From The Official Microsoft Blog – News and Perspectives from Microsoft : Weekend Reading for Feb 20/21: Windows Phone 7 Series called, and the world said…..]

Take the Unified Access Gateway:

A really nice multi function smart proxy, SSL VPN concentrator and the connection point for Direct Access. The best feature is Direct Access which lets your remote PCs act like part of your domain even when a user is not logged into the console. Have you ever dreamed of pushing software updates to a phone sitting on a remote worker's desk over the internet? Now you can...

Take the Outlook Social Connector:

Done right, the Outlook Social connector might just change the way we share and discover information in the enterprise. Think of a way to quickly discover details about that person who was CC'd on that email you just received, or learn more about that person who just joined your project team. Cool...

Take Exchange 2010:

Real high availability solutions packaged in a way which make them easy to deploy without a bunch of complex configuration, and to top it all off it works across data centers too! Whoa?

Interesting that when asked Ballmer blew off any kind of opportunity to claim a thought share win on the tablet computing front...

When asked about the rumored Courier tablet book, Ballmer claims to have never seen the video and to only have heard details of the rumor. He does, however, hint at possible inside knowledge of the dual-screen, multi-touch device.

"I hope somebody does stuff like that," he says.

[From Ballmer: Win Mobile 7 will bring Zune features | Electronista]

I suspect that when Ballmer says "somebody" everyone reads Apple... but that may just be me :)

One of my co-workers showed up in my office today with his shinny new google android phone. I played around with it a fair bit and I much say I like the UI and the speed of the various applications. The time it takes for mobile safari and search boxes to become active on the iphone is painful. But I digress...

The android platform vs the iphone platform is starting to feel like a familiar battle. The battle between windows and OSX.

Let's see, OSX was the operating system that could. It didn't have all the fancy applications but it ran faster, and the core productivity applications were faster and better integrated into the core platform. Windows, had a million applications, and games but most of them were mediocre and were not well integrated into the core experience. Sound familiar?

Perhaps slow and steady will win the ultimate race here. Google might be in this battle for the long game, and in the fickle consumer market which is cell phones they might just have a better platform.