Microsoft Dominates Its Own Mobile Ecosystem

TechFlash reports: In a world obsessed with iPhone apps, I've been looking forward to getting an alternative perspective from Microsoft technology specialist Michael Gannotti's countdown of his top-10 favorite Windows Phone (formerly Windows Mobile) apps. Gannotti's list has been rolled out in a series of posts on Microsoft's official Windows Blog this month.

In particular, I was looking forward to discovering some hidden gems made by independent developers working with the Windows Mobile platform. And there are definitely some of those on the list. But with the naming of his top pick today—Microsoft's Bing app for Windows Phones—fully half of Gannotti's top picks come from Microsoft itself.

Of course, the real strength of any platform is the ecosystem of third-party applications. Microsoft has been saying that its problem isn't a lack of third-party Windows Mobile apps, but rather a lack of an obvious, official, and centralized place to find and buy them. The company sought to address that issue with the rollout of its Windows Marketplace for Mobile app store this fall.

The site msmobiles.com also took note of all the Microsoft-developed apps on Gannotti's list, interpreting it as him "shilling" for the company. But that view doesn't make a lot of sense because it would actually be more in Microsoft's interest to highlight third-party mobile apps, as Apple does in its commercials, for example.

In that way, Gannotti's personal favorites come off more like a symptom of the weakness of Windows Mobile's ecosystem, at least when it comes to the types of apps that get people excited enough to put them on a top-10 list. Here's the list.

For the record, Gannotti noted in his post today that he's running Windows Mobile 6.1, not Windows Mobile 6.5, which means that he wasn't considering a number of potentially interesting, touch-enable apps in his ranking.

And the rest of the Windows Mobile user base apparently doesn't see things in quite the same way as Gannotti does, based on the apps they're downloading. Only three of the 18 "most popular" Windows Mobile apps currently listed in the Windows Marketplace for Mobile are from Microsoft itself.