Santa Came Early to Mobile Devices

The Microsoft “stack” just got a lot deeper on top of my Windows Phone 7, which is news enough, but I am ecstatic that Redmond spread the loveto my Apple iPad, and to the iPhones and Android phones of my friends and colleagues as well!

Over recent days, Microsoft has been pushing out release after release of key technologies to Windows Phone 7, and even to iPhones, iPads, and Androiddevices. I actually got a bit dizzy trying to keep track of everything they’ve been doing.

This week, I’ll recap and I’ll tell you what has memost excited about what these releases foretell about Microsoft and SharePoint in 2012.

Let’s start with a quick run-down of what’s been and is being released:

I learned about the development of OneNote for the iPad quite a few months back and, honestly, it was the one release I was MOST looking forward tothis year. I adore OneNote and would prefer to do most of my work in it. OneNote makes it so easy for me to collect information, research,collaborate, and (of course) take notes.

Its one shortcoming was lack of an iPad app, and I was using my iPad with increasing frequency in meetings.

Iswitched to Evernote which is an excellent application and still has a lot of advantages over OneNote on the iPad, but Evernote, for some reason,wasn’t providing an iFilter on the PC, so you couldn't search Evernote notes using Windows Desktop Search.

If there’s one thing I use more thanOneNote, it’s search, so that hurt. Now I can start migrating back to OneNote wherever possible, and I’m looking forward to it!

The apps actually leave quite a bit to be desired. OneNote doesn’t yet support rich text formatting, ink, or many other pretty important features. Butat long last it’s enough to take notes on an iPad during a meeting—notes that you can sync back to the PC and WinPhone 7 devices via SkyDrive.

TheSkyDrive app doesn’t integrate deeply into my iPad—I’d much prefer to be using SkyDrive (where I have 25GB of free storage, as opposed to 5GB oniCloud) as a “native” storage. And Lync doesn’t integrate deeply into the Messaging hub.

BUT, folks, that’s OK.

Unlike some competitors, who can release shoddy software and call it “Beta” so that they don’t have to support it, until theydiscover it really didn’t hit the mark and kill it (Wave, anyone?), Microsoft once again proves in these releases that it can get a product across thefinish line, release it to the hundreds of millions of people around the globe that are Microsoft customers, and stand behind the product.

There’s zero doubt that Microsoft will be adding features to these apps. OneNote 1.3 is bare bones, to be sure. But it’s out the door, and now the teamcan get moving on adding some of the many high value features of OneNote to the next revision.

Same with Lync and SkyDrive. No doubt that morewill come.

Personally, the next app release that I’m jones-ing for is whatever the Skype+Lync integration produces. I really, really miss havingSkype on my Windows Phone 7.

Perhaps the most important thing to be “released” this week is insight into Microsoft’s current direction, which is to spread its applications acrossplatforms. There’s a lot of internal debate at Microsoft about whether to “covet” Microsoft Office and other applications, and keep them running onWindows only.

I don’t agree with that position. In fact, I think “holding back” this far has hurt Microsoft, as people have turned to QuickOffice,Keynote, Pages, and other Office replacements only because they needed to work—somehow—on their iPads and iPhones and such.

I really hope and expect that in 2012 we will continue to see Microsoft spread its development across platforms.

Sure, Windows 8 desktop and phone willbe “best”—providing the deepest integration and richest feature set for applications, but iOS and Android should be “better” and “good” experiences forapplication users, as well.