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Last week in his personal blog, WebIS founder Alex Kac had some thoughts on the current state of the Windows Mobile OS. In a nutshell, he feels it is going down the same fractured, haphazard development route that the Palm OS did. A sleek, standardized OS is being replaced by a kludgy patchwork that requires a different proprietary install for each device, playing havoc with the feature sets and application interoperability.

A few years ago Palm was at the top of its game and had thousands of applications. But quickly developers started leaving and going to the more stable Windows Mobile. It had little to do with the operating system or zen of Palm or whatever. It had to do with the fact that the OS was becoming fragmented and becoming difficult to deal with as each device that came out broke this or that. You no longer were writing software for the Palm, but instead for the Palm Zire, or the III or whatnot. Each device had a custom PalmOS that required some custom coding for.

Mostly due to HTC, Windows Mobile is slowly going that same way. In the past we could write to the Windows Mobile spec and mostly everything worked on any device. Now HTC is doing so much custom stuff and breaking so many things its ridiculous. Palm is no better. They write their add-on software without regard to third party developers. They take customizable registry entries and turn them into static ones. They break APIs. They provide broken drivers. The list goes on.

As the man responsible for such well known and successful mobile apps as Pocket Informant, interoperability is a big deal for Mr. Kac and rightly so. He needs to know that the user will get the same look and feel no matter what device he/she is using, since if PI looks like crap on a device, the user won’t blame the hardware, they’ll blame the software. Interoperability should also be an issue of great importance to power users, as we tend to use multiple mobile devices, changing to suit the task and our whims/caprices. We expect an application we love or depend on to run on all the devices powered by that OS, and sometimes even across operating systems as well. As competition intensifies and hardware manufacturers (Mr. Kac mentions HTC in his post but I feel it is a problem for all vendors to a greater or lessor degree) use their leverage more and more to force the software platform to be tweaked for their hardware, rather then making hardware that fully utilizes the standard platform, more and more applications will need to be customized per device. For the developer, this drives up the cost of an application in terms of both resource and money. For consumers it leads to uncertainty, frustration, and as the developers pass their higher costs onto us, more expensive software.

Third party applications were the gem in Palm’s crown before it just became too much of a pain to develop for the OS, as opposed to the more streamlined, standards oriented WM. Now, under pressure from Apple and soon Android, will Windows Mobile suffer the same fate, paying the cost for two many implementation corners cut to make hardware release dates?

Plug and Play is a cornerstone of the Windows OS for a reason. I know just recently, I switched to a desktop (temporarily) from a laptop and was thrilled to note my vast array of peripherals slowly install themselves after I plugged them into the new unit. No fuss, no bother, I was up and running in 15 minutes of intense, automated driver action. It is IMPERITIVE that the Plug and Play philosophy remain strong in Windows Mobile. The more the OS caters to each device at the cost of the standard user experience, the closer it gets to the Sargasso Sea of Mobile OS that Palm is currently floating in.