By Felicity Ussher, 19 May 1999 00:20
NEWS Microsoft Windows faces a serious threat from Web access devices, according to Giga Information Group. At this week's Gigaworld 99 conference in Barcelona, Giga's chief research officer, Gig Graham, predicted that the Internet phone will be the most popular Web access terminal - and will eventually erode Windows' market share. Microsoft is battling against Symbian, Sun and others to position Windows CE as the Netphone operating system (OS) of choice. But Graham told Silicon.com: "We're expecting the majority of Netphones to access the Web without any operating system at all. The browser is all most customers need." He added: "There will be no reason to run Windows CE on a mobile phone." The head of IS management services for a leading UK mobile network service agreed. "Our Netphones are supplied by market leaders, Ericsson, Nokia and Nortel. They'll be putting the browser on the handset, for sure, but the jury is still out on whether to include an operating system. It looks like they might favour Symbian, a joint industry product, but whatever it is, we'll follow their lead," they said. Graham said Microsoft revenues will be affected, if the software giant fails to control new Web access devices. He said he expects European telcos to give away OS-free phones for free, with a view to boosting revenues on bandwidth usage and enticing customers to use their online data services. Netphones are expected to use XML (extensible markup language) style sheets to browse the Web. Only when confidential transactions need to be secured will an operating system be required.
In order to post a comment you need to be registered and logged in.
Log in or create your silicon.com account below