Apple user goes mobile with Microsoft

This article appeared in the April issue of CRN as part of the main feature "A winning formula for reselling mega-vendors"

This month’s cover feature looks at Microsoft’s mobility play. I decided to take it personally (literally). 

As editor of CRN, I regularly find myself at industry events as a rare iPhone user in a world of Windows Phones. Microsoft has been a champion of the channel for decades and many of our readers made a lot of money off the back of Gates’, then Ballmer’s, stewardships. No wonder so many resellers rock Nokias. 

I’m loathe to call myself an Apple fanboy, but I’m currently typing on a MacBook, with an iPad Mini beside me and my iPhone 4S in my pocket.

Over two weeks in March, I tried to shelve my iPhone, left my Macbook in its case and tucked the iPad away. Could a Nokia Lumia 1020 and Surface Pro 2 fill the void?

I’ll start with the good. The 1020 is a nice piece of kit. It’s an eye-catcher, and I’m a particular fan of the Windows Phone interface. For all the swooning around Apple’s Jony Ive, I was under-impressed with iOS 7. At least the Windows Phone UI is trying to do something different.

I have also fallen out of love with my iPhone since iOS 7 was released. I’d say I’m an iPhone power user – you’ve no doubt read stories on techpartner.news that were written, researched and uploaded into our content manage-ment system via that 3.5-inch Retina display. 

But the glitch around multitasking introduced in iOS 7 has been a major headache. I’ve been surprised that no one has made more of the flaw, which to my mind is worse than the iPhone 4 “antenna-gate”. (For more, search online for “iOS 7 refreshes apps after switching”. One of the Apple Support threads is at 43 pages and counting).

My initial experience of the Lumia was positive. Easy to set up, intuitive, nice screen, decent battery life. But little things started to gnaw, especially certain websites failing to render properly. Setting up two-factor authentication across multiple apps and logins was also a minefield.

Onto the Surface. The idea was not whether the Surface would replace my iPad Mini or Macbook, but whether it could fit a sweet spot in between and hence remove the need for two devices. Certainly it is superior to the iPad as a “true” computer – the speed, of course, but also its ability to access the whole, unbridled internet. The Type Cover is also a nifty device and far better than any keyboard dock I’ve used for the iPad. But Windows 8 still suffers from split personality and makes me question whether that Holy Grail of a single interface for PC and tablet is actually possible. 

I won’t go into depth about the pros and cons. You may call me indoctrinated, but despite a relatively positive experience, I won’t be dumping my iDevices any time soon. 

This trial was also an insight into the challenge of switching a user from one environment to another. The biggest obstacle I faced was not the UI or the feeds and speeds. It was the cloud.
I have a lot of my life in Dropbox, and plenty more in Evernote. I have also been dabbling with Google Docs; and an increasing number of my working documents are on Drive.

The only way to truly road test Microsoft’s devices would have been to embrace OneDrive and OneNote. Without going to the Microsoft cloud, there is no way to properly embrace Office 365, for instance. 

The battle to lock in the user will not be won and lost on hardware or software preference, but who hosts the data. Why else the current race to the bottom in cloud storage prices? 

The ability to link SaaS and IaaS gives Microsoft – with Office 365 and OneDrive – an edge over its Cupertino rival (though not, of course, over Google). It also lends sense to the release of Office for iPad. Software licensing revenue aside, the chance to win millions of iPad users to OneDrive seems a canny play.