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Comment by frederickcook | Hacker News Reader

In the PC market, Apple competes on quality, Microsoft (with hardware manufacturers) competes on price. This is the world Ballmer imagined for the smartphone market, but when Google knocked the floor out by giving away the OS (or even paying the carrier a cut of the search revenue), there is no place left for Microsoft to position itself.

Unless Windows Mobile is a vastly superior product to Android (and how likely is that?), it'll be left out of the smartphone market unless they can give it away and try to make it up in Bing search revenue.

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There is a place left for MS. Complete windows domain / exchange / current-telephony-OCS-or-whatever-it's-called-today integration. Automatic profiles, policies, security, calendar and contacts migration. There are loads of companies which would be happy with "locked to the domain" company smartphones, because they already have the backend ready (AD and Exchange).

Blackberry can provide a lot of those features, but not all.

Activesync can do almost all that now. Exchange, calendar, contacts, policies, security (not profiles or telephony).

And iPhone has very good activesync support.

If Microsoft goes after RIM and leverages their enterprise footprint they could quickly become viable. If they compete in the consumer market with Apple and Google they are toast.

I'm not sure that's true. The Google I/O conference made a pretty compelling case for Android's Enterprise chops and Microsoft has (ironically) backed itself into a corner by making Exchange and other servers open to non-Microsoft clients.

As someone who runs an enterprise's It dept. I'm not sure I can see Enterprise features that Microsoft could compete on (Security, Exchange Support and Remote Wipe are my real concerns and all seem to be covered by Froyo)

They could just lose money, up to tens of billions, for a decade while working their way up to a solid 3rd place position.

Worked for Xbox.

I think it is still too early to say that. Microsoft has yet to recoup the money they invested in the Xbox, and they probably won't anytime soon. And while they are still ahead of Sony in the console race, the PS3 has picked up quite a bit lately. Microsoft could very well finish the race dead last at the end of the current generation, with Sony at the top spot and Nintendo a close second.

The only problem is they have to actually do the catching up.

I'm not sure they can.

This market is much more complex, with a faster-moving platform, more hardware innovation, and competition (Apple, Nokia, RIM and Google) that can't be bullied or out-spent.

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