Gates asserts claim on mobile era

NEW ORLEANS -- It was hard to miss the underlying message Bill Gates delivered during his opening keynote at Microsoft's first annual Mobile Developers Conference (MDC) last night.

A humorous video Gates recycled from his January CES keynote in Las Vegas, jokingly made reference to Microsoft "missing the boat" on the Internet during the mid 1990s.

As the mobile computing era gathers steam, Gates' speech signified that this time he won't let the moment pass by unnoticed.

"Every developer here should be thinking about how they can build Web services [for mobile devices]," Gates said. Microsoft yesterday officially launched its .Net Compact Framework to help developers working with tools like Visual Studio .Net develop applications for devices like the smartphone.

Microsoft's vision is to provide the tools and platforms to unify what Gates said will be scenarios where users continue to interact with multiple form factors from the PC, to PDAs, cell phones, and wireless terminals. The success of the 1990s PC connectivity era was "just a warm-up for what will happen this decade."

Even voice communications will become integrated into the overall software mix, Gates claimed. "We can take the divide between the voice world and the software world and bring them together," he said.

Ultimately, the end game for Microsoft as demonstrated by MDC is it must migrate its legions of Visual Studio developers to the mobile platform, said Ed Suwanjindar, lead product manager at Microsoft's mobile devices division.

With AT&T and Verizon committed to shipping smartphones starting mid year and analyst projections suggesting as many as 700 million mobile devices will be sold worldwide in the coming years, its opportunity is immense, Suwanjindar said.

"For developers, that's potentially hundreds of millions of sockets," he added.

This week's MDC conference will be repeated in Paris and Asia over the coming months. According to conference officials, 1,200 people registered at MDC New Orleans, 80 percent of which were developers, 15 percent IT managers, and 5 "others."

However, anecdotal evidence suggests the percentage of IT managers was much higher, according to an executive on the show floor who did not want to be named. "We have not seen as many developers as we would have liked," said the executive.