Mobile Sandbox

At the ITU telecom world event in HongKong, Microsoft kicked off its connected services sandbox; a way for developers to work with service providers to develop and test new kinds of offerings, fusing Web 2.0 with classical communications services.

Given that mobile phones outnumber PC’s, and many people expect that it would be the preferred way to access the web for most casual users, it does make sense to focus on such applications.

However, in the light of a recent announcement of an alliance from Sun, Nokia and Ericsson, as well as the skimpy nature of information on the site itself, it looks like a rushed decision. Surprisingly, apart from the brief copyright tagline below, there’s very little indication of the Microsoft involvement on the front page - and with just 12 mashups listed including a cryptically named “One More Service” which returns a 404 error when clicked, it does seem like a botched kick-off. Interestingly enough, Firefox works better with this site than Internet Explorer does!

General IT lore has it that Microsoft gets the act together only by the third iteration; this offering seems to validate the old story.