In response to iPhone and BlackBerry competition in the mobile space, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer said to CIO Summit attendees that Windows Mobile development will be stepping it up a notch.
“There are opportunities for us to accelerate our execution in this area,” he said. “We’ve done a lot of work to make sure we have a team that will be able to accelerate it.”
Microsoft really does need to speed up its game, especially considering Windows Mobile 6.5 does little that community programmers haven’t already been able to recreate independently. The new Internet Explorer is nice, don’t get me wrong, but Windows Mobile 7 will have to be a much bigger upgrade to really catch consumers’ attention. From a developer standpoint, Ballmer is torn on how to speed up the presently-cluttered licensing process.
“Here’s the catch 22. A lot of what it would mean to simplify things always looks to us like removing options. For every option we remove I know we’d upset some customers for whom that was the perfect option.”
[via PC World]