email article printer friendly

Windows Mobile and Visual Studio Sync Up
Microsoft VP Ya-Qin Zhang discusses improvements in Windows Mobile 5.0 that will interest Visual Studio developers, as well as broader issues in the mobile market.
Interview by Jim Fawcette

May 17, 2005

Ya-Qin Zhang Corporate Vice President Mobile and Embedded Devices Division, Microsoft

Back in 2003 we quoted Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates as saying, "We'll invest, and invest, and invest in mobility." Two years later, Microsoft is indeed continuing to invest, posting a net loss of $32 million on sales of $240 million for the nine months ended March 31. While those results show growth in revenues and a reduction in losses, it means that Microsoft's mobile group is roughly the size of PalmSource and dwarfed by $37 billion Nokia.

Microsoft hopes its newest mobile operating system, Windows Mobile 2005 (with versions for PDA and smartphones), will change that. The 2005 release was launched by Gates in a joint keynote for attendees of the Microsoft Mobile & Embedded DevCon 2005 and VSLive! in Las Vegas on May 10. Although the OS is not shipping yet, it shows substantial improvements and, for our audience, far better development facilities including more managed code and tight integration with Visual Studio 2005.

We met with Ya-Qin Zhang (pronounced yah-CHEEN jong), Corporate Vice President of the Mobile and Embedded Devices Division, to discuss the release and the mobile market in general. Zhang is an experienced computer systems researcher with 70 patents who entered college in China at 12 and graduated first in his class before coming to the United States to get his doctorate. Zhang helped start Microsoft's Beijing research laboratory in 1999 along with Kai-Fu Lee, now head of Microsoft Speech Server, before moving to the mobile division. According to The New York Times, "Microsoft's chief executive, Steven A. Ballmer, first discussed the job with Dr. Zhang while he was on a trip to China in 2003 and the two men were in the anteroom of the state guesthouse, waiting for a meeting with the Chinese prime minister, Wen Jiabao. 'This is really important to the company,' Mr. Ballmer said, as Dr. Zhang recalls it."