Windows SideShow for iPhone
A couple of months ago here at Ikanos Consulting towers we were thinking about cool things we could do with Windows SideShow. We're very keen firm believers in SideShow and already had a few devices cooking up. The core of our SideShow world is a piece …
Context & Ripple Effects
This lands a month after Engadget and the::unwired picked over whether Vista's SideShow would reach Windows Mobile devices at all — a question of Microsoft extending its own secondary-display platform to its own phone OS. Ikanos Consulting's answer cuts across that debate entirely: rather than wait on Redmond, the firm is building SideShow support for the iPhone itself, alongside the other SideShow devices it says it already has in development.
The significance is the direction of travel. SideShow was pitched as a Vista companion-screen ecosystem for Microsoft hardware partners; a third-party consultancy pointing it at Apple's handset turns it into a cross-platform client play instead. It also extends the year's pattern of unofficial iPhone development, following reports as far back as June 2007 of interesting iPhone developments outside Apple's own roadmap.
First-order effects
- iPhone owners gain a route to Vista's SideShow gadgets — calendar, media, system data on a second screen — without any involvement from Apple or from Microsoft's mobile division.
- Ikanos Consulting converts its SideShow advocacy into a differentiator, positioning itself as the consultancy that can deliver SideShow endpoints Microsoft's own partners have not.
Second-order effects
- The November question of whether SideShow belongs on Windows Mobile gets an awkward answer: if a small consultancy can put it on the iPhone, Microsoft's argument for keeping the platform tethered to its own devices weakens.
- Windows Mobile device makers lose a planned point of differentiation if SideShow stops being exclusive to their handsets.
Third-order effects
- If third-party bridges like this hold up, peripheral-display ecosystems stop being platform lock-in and become portable software layers — with the platform owner's blessing becoming optional rather than required.
- It foreshadows the broader 2007-2008 dynamic around the iPhone: an installed base attractive enough that rivals' technologies get ported to it, forcing Microsoft to decide whether to fight or formalize cross-platform support.
The trend: Microsoft's device-companion technologies are being pulled off their home platforms by third-party developers, with the iPhone's gravity turning one-time exclusives into cross-platform features.