Microsoft: Windows Phone Runs Risk Of Losing Big

At MIX11, Watson’s team had something to talk about in the upcoming “Mango” version of the Windows Phone operating system. He cited the Bing Search Extras and Live Agents as two of the top new features that stand out in his view.

“Search Extras is cool technology to have apps solve a customer problem,” he said. “It leverages the Bing search engine.”

Better feature, more apps

In a blog post on the new features, Matt Bencke, general manager of the Windows Phone business, said, “’Multitasking’ meets Integrated Experiences with Live Agents: Superior customer engagement with real-time interactions via Live Tiles, Push Notifications, Deep Linking and Background Agents. Multitasking is also enhanced to allow for fast applications switching, as well as background audio and file transfer.”

Microsoft says there are now more than 13,000 Windows Phone applications and it’s growing, and there are more than 1,500 new APIs for the platform that developers can use to create new experiences. “There is an entire generation of developers who are unencumbered by constraints of the last generation of the technology,” Watson said. “We just give them the tools and get out of the way.”

Among several new features developers at MIX11 raved about, is the new support for Silverlight and XNA in the same project. This means developers can create richer applications with high-quality 3D graphics as seen on Xbox games.

“If you want to have a Silverlight application with XNA performance or an XNA game with Silverlight controls, you can have that,” Watson said.

A rich history of developing

Meanwhile, Watson knows to pay homage to Microsoft’s rich developer history. “The company was founded by developers and its first product was a language,” he said. And when the phone opportunity presented itself, we recognised the priority of reaching out to developers. You don’t get hired on my team unless you write code for fun. Being able to make a personal connection with developers is important.”

Watson said the Nokia opportunity is huge for his team in terms of its global reach and the opportunity to extend the platform to developers worldwide. “Nokia makes 1.2 million cell phones a day,” he said. “They’re in countries we’re not in yet. This is a huge opportunity for our developer base.”

With that, Watson noted a bit of advice offered up by a former Microsoft executive, Robbie Bach, who used to run Microsoft’s devices unit as president of the Microsoft Entertainment & Devices Division.

Bach, a mentor to Watson, told him the opportunity he faces with the Nokia deal is like the opportunity Bach faced when he was the top marketing executive in charge of Microsoft Office during the 1990s and battled against Corel and Lotus when they had 80 percent market share to Microsoft’s 20 percent. Microsoft came to own that space, and analysts are projecting that Microsoft will become the No. 2 smartphone vendor by 2015.

“Robbie told me this is a unique point in time; it’s a huge opportunity, so don’t muck it up,” Watson said.