As we saw in the last installment in this series on advanced mobile applications, some analysts believe WinMobile is the platform of destiny. "I think at this point the game is over. Microsoft has won," Ken Dulaney told us. Dulaney is vice president of mobile computing at Gartner.

However, others say that unlike in the battle for the corporate desktop—which pitted PC against Mac 20 years ago, and ended in almost total PC victory—the mobile device market will likely support multiple platforms for years to come. "I think the market is big enough to accommodate three, maybe four leaders," says Nathan Dyer, an analyst in Yankee Group's enterprise mobility group.

Certainly Research in Motion, maker of the popular BlackBerry platform, is conceding nothing, and doesn't appear to be suffering in the marketplace either. It recently reported a 16 percent rise in quarterly revenues year over year and announced that its base of customers had broken the 9 million mark.

One thing BlackBerry brings to the battle is intense customer loyalty, analysts says. "The customers we have today tell us that if the functionality is not there, they're not going to use a platform [Windows] just because it happens to be their desktop platform of choice," says Jeff McDowell, the company's vice president of global alliances.

Maybe, but despite its recent successes after a down couple of years fighting legal battles, one senses that RIM may be a little on the defensive these days. Microsoft is coming hard and, notwithstanding what McDowell says, it has a good story to tell about why enterprises should choose the Windows Mobile platform for developing and deploying applications.

For one thing, Windows Mobile has caught up with BlackBerry on the e-mail front, or so Microsoft claims. In the last installment of this series, we quoted RIM's McDowell saying that, unlike BlackBerry, Windows Mobile could not do "true" push e-mail - automatically and securely transmit e-mail to a mobile device as soon as it's received at the mail server. But that is no longer the case, says John Dietz, group product manager for Windows Mobile in Microsoft's mobile communications business.

"With Windows Mobile 5, they were correct," Dietz says. "We had a push-to-pull system. That was their huge advantage."

But even before the introduction of Windows Mobile 6, with the release of the Messaging Security and Feature Pack (MSFP) for WinMobile5 in February 2006, the platform could do true push e-mail, Dietz says. The first devices supporting MSFP began appearing last summer.

Windows Mobile 6 added more security features and easier integration. The first handhelds using WM6 are beginning to appear now.

McDowell also suggested that BlackBerry was a superior platform because, unlike Windows Mobile, it could push corporate data to a device to support CRM and other advanced mobile applications, much as it pushed e-mail. Also not true, Dietz says. "That is out-of-date [information]. There are a couple of ways [with WinMobile] to push out corporate data using the same mechanisms that push e-mail uses."

Whatever the relative technical merits of the two platforms, the Microsoft message is evidently getting some traction. If you look at the installed base of converged devices that include phone and PDA functions - smartphones, PDA phones - WinMobile lags competitors such as BlackBerry and Symbian. But Dietz says research firm IDC is forecasting that the installed base of WinMobile devices will grow faster than other platforms, at a compounded annual rate of 57 percent over the next five years.

Equipment makers are flocking to the WinMobile bandwagon. "Last year, we sold 11 million Windows Mobile licenses for converged devices," Dietz says. "That was double the year before, and we expect to sell another 20 million next year."

The number of licenses sold is not the same as the number of devices in users' hands, he concedes. But it's a clear indication that Windows Mobile is on a growth trajectory. Although he mistakenly suggests that the number of BlackBerry subscribers is only six million, Dietz is right when he notes, "In one year, we sold through as many as their entire installed base."

In the enterprise market, Microsoft has seen some giant-size victories. Last year, for example, the company announced it was selling Windows Mobile software for 500,000 handsets to the U.S. Census Bureau to equip employees for the 2010 census.

Developers are also flocking to Microsoft's corner. Dietz cites another IDC study from 2006, showing that developer tools for creating Windows Mobile and Windows CE applications already had a bigger share of the market than tools for other platforms.

The dominant place Microsoft holds as maker of the PC operating system and application development environment of choice for most enterprises may be the company's key competitive advantage in the mobile market. According to Dietz, 71 percent of developers working on desktop applications in the enterprise sector already use Microsoft development tools such as Visual Studio, the company's flagship product.

And in recent years the company has been building on that advantage by integrating mobile and desktop operating systems and development tools. Since 2005, for example, Visual Studio has incorporated Microsoft's mobile developer's tool kit. It means developers can use the same environment to build desktop and mobile applications, allowing them to recycle and build on skills and experience already acquired.

Starting with Windows Mobile 5, the operating system included the .NET Compact Framework running in ROM. This is a subset of Microsoft's .NET Framework, which includes pre-coded solutions for common Windows programming requirements, and provides shortcuts for developers. Windows Mobile 6 adds an updated version of the .NET Compact Framework that Dietz says "doubles" the performance of mobile applications.

It also adds a small-footprint version of Microsoft's SQL relational database management running in ROM, making it easier and cheaper to develop database-related applications.

What all of this means is that in many cases, developers can build an application for the desktop and the mobile environment at the same time, or with minimal extra effort, port an application to Windows Mobile. Dietz cites an instance of this inside Microsoft.

The company already had a Critical Situation Manager application to support the senior support engineers who have to respond within a stipulated time to trouble calls from enterprise customers with service level agreements. When customer calls came in, the application e-mailed or paged the appropriate engineer, who then logged into a Web portal to get details and manage the case.

An inhouse developer—who had no training or experience in developing mobile applications, Dietz says —was able to very quickly port the CritSit application to Windows Mobile. Result? The support engineers no longer have to collect e-mail to get alerts or find a computer to log in to the Web portal. Alerts are pushed to their WinMobile devices wherever they are, and they can access the Web portal wirelessly.

"It took one person's time in one month to complete the [initial] work," Dietz says. "And they had the product in beta and then deployed to 300 [engineers] within three months."

Microsoft is now looking to leverage its desktop-mobile cross-platform capabilities, and its relationships with some 300,000 Windows developers around the world to drive Windows Mobile forward.

"Most of those [developers] have never done applications for mobile," he says. "But that's my target audience. That's where we think it's going to move. We want the guy who created dogfood.com or the CRM application for limousine drivers. We want to make Windows Mobile part of his company's mobile strategy."

The leading mobile platforms have all done an equally good job at providing solutions in the top application areas, Dietz says —applications such as sales and field force automation. Microsoft is interested in going after "the long tail" of mobile applications. He's referring to author Chris Anderson's analysis in The Long Tail of post-Internet market conditions and technologies that increasingly make it cost-effective to provide niche solutions.

It is already hitting many of those niches. According to Dietz, there are about 18,000 Windows Mobile and Pocket PC applications today. About a tenth of them are certified under Microsoft's Mobile2Market program, one of several it runs to encourage and support developers. Mobile2Market offers testing and certification of packaged mobile applications. Mobile carriers are now using Mobile2Market certification as a minimum requirement for software products they will consider reselling, Dietz says.

Microsoft also offers "mobility competency" testing and certification for small developers, a program launched in November 2005. It costs $375 but developers who are certified join Microsoft's partner program for 18 months, after which they have to be recertified. They get ten hours of consultative support and software licenses worth considerably more than $375, Dietz says.

"It's a great recruiting vehicle," he says.

And that recruitment drive may be the key to continued an accelerated growth for Windows Mobile. The winner of the battle for the corporate palmtop just may be the platform that offers the most choice in applications.

That is one reason why it would be foolish to dismiss Symbian, the other front-runner in this race. Symbian offers plenty of choice, as we'll see in the final installment of this series.