Tellme for iPhone due by June
SANTA CLARA, Calif.—Microsoft is indeed working on an iPhone application. — As I predicted, it is the company's Tellme unit that is actively developing a program for Apple's iPhone. Tellme offers voice-activated search for a variety of phones, including the BlackBerry.
Context & Ripple Effects
The story closes a loop that began when Microsoft moved to acquire Tellme Networks in 2007, buying its way into voice-activated mobile search rather than building it in-house. Coverage at the time questioned whether the deal was serious mobile strategy or just shadow boxing in mobile directory assistance against Google and the carriers. Now Tellme is porting its voice search — already live on BlackBerry and other handsets — to Apple's iPhone, putting Microsoft software on its most important rival's platform.
First-order effects
- iPhone users gain access to Microsoft's voice-activated search by June, meaning Tellme must adapt an app built for BlackBerry-style devices to Apple's tightly controlled App Store distribution model.
- Microsoft gets a foothold on the iPhone itself, reaching Apple's users directly instead of waiting for Windows Mobile to compete on hardware.
Second-order effects
- Google, whose voice and mobile search ambitions were the subtext of the original Tellme acquisition, faces pressure to match voice search availability across every major platform, accelerating a cross-platform land grab.
- Apple must decide how much freedom to give a rival's search client on the iPhone — an early test of App Store gatekeeping that later platform owners would face repeatedly.
Third-order effects
- If voice interfaces prove viable as third-party apps, search shifts from a service tied to a phone's default browser toward an ambient computing layer any vendor can ship across platforms — foreshadowing the assistant era where Microsoft's own Tellme work was later compared against Siri.
- Rivals distributing software through each other's app stores becomes standard competitive behavior, structurally decoupling who makes the handset from who controls its key services.
The trend: Voice is emerging as the next interface battleground, with major platforms racing to put their assistants on rivals' hardware years before Siri made it mainstream.