DANGER!
Everyone is talking about the elaborate dance between Microsoft and Yahoo, and while the biggest tech deal in history is certainly interesting for a lot of reasons, I expect that this story will grind on for a LOOONG time before anything meaningful happens.
In the meantime, truly interesting things continue to happen, not exactly unnoticed, but certainly a little lost in the confusion. Microsoft today announced that they are buying Danger, a company you might be familiar with because of a little product called the Sidekick, pushed by T-Mobile. Now THAT is interesting. First, it represents Microsoft making yet another leap into the hardware business. Some interesting differences though. MS has a reputation for Not invented Here Syndrome, and as a result the hardware offerings before have, shall we say, taken a while to mature. This is a purchase of one of the hottest products in the space, and a company with a very different culture and different business model. What will MS do with the Sidekick? Probably a good guess it will run windows mobile in short order, but will they kill the home grown OS? If they do, will the kids still love it while the corporates warm up to it? I’m not so sure.
Another reason this is interesting is because of what it represents in terms of Microsoft’s obsession with Google. MS doesn’t seem to know if they are competing with Google as an advertising company, a software company, or an embedded OS company. They are clearly not comfortable that they can compete as a telephone OS supplier to third parties. I suppose that is fair given how they have watched Apple blow past them in 7 months on the strength of a SINGLE handset on a SINGLE carrier (who everyone says sucks)! My guess is Android will ultimately dwarf the Apple OS just on the basis of so many manufacturers. So is MS guaranteeing the viability of Windows Mobile and some yet-to-be-determined mobile advertising platform against Android? Or are they really interested in selling handsets and getting a cut of the subscription like Apple? Time will tell.
