Mobile – the new vendor lock-in?

While CSPs have meanwhile understood that offering a service without offering a suitable means to extract subscribers’ data from it again is rather … well … a way to drive off customers (to put it friendly), the big mobile OSs seem not to have adopted this yet. OK – to be fair, I have no self-experiences; only testimonials from Android and iOS, that it is hard to get all data out of their ecosystem in case you want to change away from them (however, regular facebook posts like “I have a new phone, please eMail me your number” sort-a prove it).

I do have – however – 2 self-experienced behaviours of WindowsPhones which annoy me for months (while other than that I still believe the WP to be a good phone with a lot of cool features):

1. [the minor one] If you do want to use Categories – a useful Outlook/Exchange/Live feature to structure eMail, contacts, calender items, etc. – Microsoft LIVE.com destroys your category setting when moving contacts into your live account. No way of keeping them stable – as soon as any kind of synchronization sets in, there is no way anymore to keep them at your contact items (after struggling with it ever and ever again while moving contact items into a new default folder for the benefit of syncing, I now came up with a solution of my own: I simply add the category-string into one of the contact items unused fields and thereby can sort and group by “Category” again). Admittedly this is still a matter of personal preference: Why use categories anyway …? – BUT
2. Text messages: There is still no way to extract the messages from the phone in readable format. With WP8 Microsoft introduced backup for text messages – a useful thing in order not to lose them. Text messages are constantly backuped to your OneDrive – into a place, which you cannot browse or read, in a format, which you cannot read either. And when resetting your WP8 or buying a new WP8 you get all of them back into your phone. Brilliant! Isn’t it? Emphasize lies with “WP8”! It is the one and only phone OS that leverages the feature (not even WP7 can use it).

With text messages increasingly becoming an essential part of day-to-day communication (also business-wise) it becomes more and more crucial not to lose them. And this constraint combined with using a WP actually locks you fully into the Microsoft ecosystem.

Microsoft: FIX THIS! Quick! Your phone market share is not that big anyway (and I’m the next one to consider to move off – accepting to lose my texts one last time).