Death of Ecco and the palmpilot.

[Jordan Pollack <pollack@cs.brandeis.edu>]

Jamie wrote about ecco pro death

Given that the law doesnt prevent microsoft from leveraging its
utility monopoly to absorb successful appliance markets, the
battle to watch next is the palmpilot/wince competition.

I dont use a pilot, which is a handheld pim with a hotsync
feature, but have many friends who love them. WINCE is the 
pim "executive" (thats a barebones operating system)
microsoft has been trying to establish as a standard by
making it look and feel like a Windows gui. I dont use that either,
but have been subjected to immense PR effort tho i have no friends
who use velos or cassiopieas.

In last month's WINDOWSNT magazine, there was a full page
advertisement from a company selling an add-on to help palmpilot's
syncronize correctly with microsoft OUTLOOK on windows NT. 

In fact, a search finds 3 such products compared:

http://www.chapura.com/3compare.html

Microsoft uses its windows releases to break other people's
software and adds secret functionality to the win API to favor their
own entry into other markets.

Since Microsoft is eating the PIM market with OUTLOOK included "free"
in Office, it can (and for its stockholders it  MUST) use its
traditional tweaking of proprietary file formats to disrupt the
palmpilot's syncronization ability, and hence destroy its market, in
favor of WINCE2 models which can use insider information for syncing.

Now would be a good time for 3com to sue over the market confusion
caused by microsoft choosing the name "palmpc," for wince handhelds,
and to ask DOJ to help it get a decree requireing 12 months warning on
any changes to the full "microsoft experience" of windows or office
products which impact its ability to interoperate.  (But they won't
because their real meat and potato business is in network cards and
they need to get along with microsoft.)

Professor Jordan B. Pollack   DEMO Laboratory, Volen Center for Complex Systems
Computer Science Dept, MS018  Phone (617) 736-2713/Lab x3366/Fax x2741
Brandeis University           website: http://www.demo.cs.brandeis.edu
Waltham, MA 02254             email: pollack@cs.brandeis.edu