Windows Phone 7, Silverlight is Business-Ready
Despite all the focus on multimedia and entertainment, Windows Phone 7 and Silverlight have a huge potential for business applications.
Wednesday InfoWorld published an article about Windows Phone 7 and Silverlight serving as enterprise business applications. The author points out that both platforms were seemingly geared for entertainment purposes during the MIX10 conference in Las Vegas, focusing on the music player, photo storage, the electronic diary, even gaming applications.
But what about the business exec or graphic designer? Is this device merely an answer to the iPhone? Unlike with Windows Mobile, many businesses see a great potential in Windows Phone 7 as well as Silverlight, unfortunately the enterprise business applications will come over time.
Jonathan Zuck, president of the Association for Competitive Technology told InfoWorld said that "fun applications" are what draws people to the devices--the work-related aspect comes later. "It's a natural extension of the other things they're doing with Xbox and with Zune and with Windows Media Center PCs," he said.
Despite the entertainment value, Windows Phone 7 and Silverlight are definitely "business ready." One developer said that Silverlight could be used to create web applications including spreadsheets or an interface to a financial application. Another software company applauds Microsoft for Windows Phone 7, saying that from a business standpoint, the previous OS (Windows Mobile) was lagging in terms of performance.
"There were myriad platforms, myriad screen resolutions--and it was always a challenge," said Bl Software president Darek Danielewski. "The fact that Microsoft decided to give a complete overhaul for the Windows phone, that gives me hope."
Funny how people like you embraced and praised the iPhone OS for being completely business ready from the beginning, yet the iPhone OS still has more limitation than the WP7 OS.
security permitting exactly... with so many aspects of a .net app out of your control, there is not much you can do but sit and hope that MS has implemented the OS, .net and all the APIs properly... I would be worried. just another reason why I prefer native to managed. with the main reason being compatibility between platforms. and performance.
Had iPhone ( my wife's) and WM6.5 (not any phone, but HTC HD2)... still could not match it.
There is only one phone that is 'Business Ready' and it's the Blackberry.
The Android has potential, but I haven't done enough delving into Google's layer cake API to know much.
I think that WinMo7 will have potential to interface with many popular business staples (Dynamics, Sharepoint, Exchange, etc.). It's real competition in the business sector is going to be the Blackberry, which is king in several areas (most notably the level of user managment the BES offers).
I'll reserve my opinions for when I can see a finished product or rather, when I get our cellular rep to send me one to test (when they are testing them).
More importantly, I don't see the iPhone being a business phone. Maybe if all you need a phone for is checking e-mails, but then, is that really a business phone or an excuse to buy a high dollar smart phone?
Really Microsoft is engaging with extending the development community. Instead of developing applications there are also some people that are making components for Windows Phone 7. One example is FluentComponents with their ProComponents for Windows Phone 7:
http://www.fluentcomponents.com/
They also have some interesting concept and very cool posts like this for the iPhone for Wp7:
http://blog.fluentcomponents.com/post/Building-an-animated-iPhone-like-panel-with-drag-and-drop-in-one-minute.aspx