Microsoft, for its part, has been trying to get someone – anyone – to take it seriously as a mobile platform vendor for well over a decade, with no success. Remember Windows CE? That’s how long Microsoft’s been trying to get into the game.
Windows Phone 7 was supposed to be a break from the past and a brave new world of functionality, but doesn’t feature such basic things as multitasking or cut-and-paste. Sure, neither did iOS when it first appeared. That was nearly four years ago.
Both Microsoft and Nokia have promised and not delivered, promised and not delivered, over and over and over again, for years. Even now, with the iPad revitalising the long-moribund category of “tablet” computing, Microsoft admits Windows Phone 7 is not a suitable tablet platform. For the sake of my analogy, E.H. Harriman of the Union Pacific Railroad is everyone who has wanted a decent smartphone for the past decade and a half. We’re the ones who set Apple’s super posse on the trail.
So the two have tied themselves together and plunged into the ravine, hoping for the best. We’ll see how that goes.
Butch and Sundance, for their part, survived the fall and fled to Bolivia, where they gained a certain degree of repute as bank robbers. Forced from their comfort zone, they had at least found their niche. They were happy.
I don’t want to spoil the ending of the film for you if you haven’t seen it yet – and I strongly recommend you do, it’s brilliant. But for the sake of this column, imagine Google, and Android, as the Bolivian Army.
Matthew JC. Powell couldn’t squeeze BlackBerry into the analogy. Suggestions to mjcp@me.com
_page-0001.jpg&w=100&c=1&s=0)
-1.jpg&w=100&c=1&s=0)
.png&w=100&c=1&s=0)
