A Chance For Underdogs

Any market has its winners and losers and in most cases those positions are not easy to change and those labels are not easy to wash down. The mobile market is no different in this respect presenting a rather extensive sphere with several strong players, several middlings preferring to stay in the shadow and some losers which are striving to survive and/ or return top market positions. Top players are iPhone and Android closely followed by the emerging iPad platform. The middle positions are occupied by Blackberry which lost its once leading position and Nokia's Ovi Market which prefers to stand in the shadow, relying mostly on paying apps for enterprise customers. Current outsiders are webOS and Windows, which both had all the resources as well as favorable market conditions to reach top positions but lost their chances.

webOS is really a splendid mobile platform, presenting the only precious thing Palm could boast of. However, the failure of the company together with Palm phones sales decline were caused mostly by some unreasonable strategy taken by the company's management as well as shortsighted marketing policy which, when compared to Apple's offensive strategy is really insufficient to attract crowds of consumers. When Palm's company was acquired by HP, it gave some ground to hope that the innovative and highly creative mobile platform will prosper assisted by the financial resources of the huge market giant. However, the company disappointed everybody saying there won't be any smartphones though new gadgets running webOS are on the way. At last, after a range of policy changes and alterations webOS will be an OS environment for HP's Slate, at least one of the possible environments. A new gadget will provide new prospective for app developers, as it will be necessary to create new apps as well as refined old ones, designed for Palm's line-ups, to fit the tablet's technical characteristics. Everybody hopes HP will keep to a reasonable policy towards 3-d party app developers allowing for creation of the app market paramount with that of Apple. The new tablet will be released this fall so there's quite little time left before we can see whether the reality will come up to our expectations.

Microsoft also seems to be working hard to change its market position. But to succeed in that pious activity, it must, first of all, deliver to the market some gadget which will be worth developers' efforts and consumers' money. Its Zune phone was not extremely successful while both Kin Pebble and Stone were a complete failure, recalled after several weeks of sales. At the moment Microsoft is planning to launch its WinPhone which should be a huge leap ahead and the company is doing its best to ensure its success.

Some top apps developers are rumored to have signed contracts with the company under which they are not only given all the necessary resources, gadgets and tools to develop apps for a WinPhone but are as well guaranteed to receive profits. What Microsoft expects in return is a number of quality apps which will distinguish the product at the market and single it out of crowds of other phones. It is likely to be Microsoft's latest attempt to squeeze into the market but even if it fails the company has HP's Slate with its Windows 7 OS installed and some of Asus tablets which are also to hit the market at the end of the year. So, Windows developers won't be left without work. But whether all those efforts will pay back, only time will tell.