Shakil Haroon, GM with Brazil's Spring Wireless. (Marcus Donner/PSBJ)

Shakil Haroon, a former manager in Microsoft’s mobile business, is the Seattle-based general manager for Spring Wireless, a Brazilian company that makes mobile software applications for big companies. The company established its U.S. headquarters in Seattle last year.

Haroon's past experience at Microsoft and current work in enterprise mobile software gives him a unique perspective on trends in the world of smartphones and mobile devices. Continue reading for edited excerpts from our conversation.

Q: How does Spring Wireless decide which mobile phones to work with?

Haroon: Historically, we got started focusing on the Windows Mobile platform, because that was the only game in town. If you recall, back in the early 2000s, you had these personal digital assistants, PDAs, from companies like Compaq, and those had a nice big screen, and a pretty robust operating environment, and you could develop application software that ran on those.

Fast-forward to 2004, 2005, and the operating systems became that much more powerful, with products like RIM (BlackBerry) coming out with robust messaging capability. So our customers started to say, can you run on a RIM device? As a young, entrepreneurial company, the answer is always, you bet we do, or you bet we will. You’ve got products out there now like Apple iPhone. We have to be very, very sensitive to customer requirements and follow what trends they want to adopt.

Q: Are you seeing any trends now toward one mobile platform or another?

Haroon: For enterprises, the demand tends to lag consumer actually by upwards of 12 to 24 months. So whereas you’ll walk around the street today and see tons of folks using an Apple iPhone or an Android phone, the corporate user, particularly the guy that’s relying on these devices to get their daily jobs done, tend to be maybe a couple of generations behind, because there are a lot of things to work out.

One, is this device secure? Two, does this device communicate and work with the back-end SAP system? Three, is this device available in a form factor that is robust -- can I drop it and does it shatter? -- or does it have the additional features that I might need as a mobile worker, such as a bar-code reader, such as a good camera, or some sort of a sensor on the device. There are a whole bunch of work-related dependencies that have to be sorted out. So we see the consumer market as a leading indicator.

So you’re thinking ahead now to Android devices in the enterprise?

Haroon: Exactly, the fundamental issue is how long before we see those things show up in the pockets of the mobile worker or the sales guy out there in the field.

Your roots are in Windows Mobile. What type of phone are using now? I use an iPhone. I’m a convert. I have three teenagers, and they all wanted an iPhone, because they wanted music on their phones. I just got a bunch of Christmas presents, and they got an iPhone, and that’s how I ended up having one.

Q: How do you feel about Windows Mobile’s decline in the market?

Haroon: I have psychological pain over why Microsoft was beaten to the punch with having an application store go live. Here’s a company that pioneered this space. And so it’s a point of pride, in a way, but at the same time, there’s some bittersweetness there.

Q: What do you think happened?

Haroon: We were a company that achieved a level of success that hasn’t been seen in the business world in almost the history of time. It has been such a monumental business success that we thought that we could turn around any situation anytime we wanted. That’s the confidence, maybe, that we had. Perhaps it was an overconfidence, but that was the mindset. Our success was so outsized that we lost an appreciation for needing to consistently and aggressively innovate, and take risks, even in small areas like, at the time, mobile software. All that said, there is no such thing as game over in this business.

Q: Is Windows Phone 7 the answer there?

Haroon: I’m an applications guy. I think that an operating system in and of itself is not going to be the differentiating item in today’s world. The way now is through applications. That is what is going to bring value and magic to a platform. That is what is going to turn around any platform’s fortunes. Look at Palm -- you might argue that WebOS was the best operating system that came along in its time, bar none. Multitasking, touch screen, just a beautiful experience. But where are the apps? Can you name one app on WebOS that’s just the must-have?

Q: Among your customers, are mobile devices still an IT department purchase of the hardware, or are people actually bringing their own phones for these uses?

Haroon: That’s interesting. Historically, it’s been very much a controlled, company-liable device that has been used. Today that trend has been shifting pretty rapidly, because typically mobile workers out there will get used to a particular interface style, for example the touch screens, where now you’ve got this capacitive screen where just literally a smooth touch will help you navigate the device.

Those standards are starting to be driven by consumer devices, and as such the worker will say I want to use Apple, or I want to use Android. Businesses are still struggling with this problem. On one hand, they don’t want to be in the business of managing hoards of different phones, and on the other hand, they don’t want to be fighting their own employees’ preferences for how they want to interact with this information. It’s a problem that they’re really grappling with. It’s not a clean answer yet.

Q: Has that variety changed the way you write applications?

Haroon: It presents a challenge, because it’s both a device level dependency, as well as a server-side dependency. It’s not only a function of Apple vs. Android vs. Windows Mobile. Sometimes it can be just the evolution of a single operating system to a new major upgrade. Microsoft Windows 6.5 to 7.0 is an example. The challenge is just needing to support all these different devices as they come out. We’ve had to abstract our software application away from the operating system enough to where there can be a migration path that’s easier, compared to hard-wiring our application into a specific operating system and being completely dependent on that environment to deliver any functionality.

Q: You’re not really tapping into the engineering talent base in Seattle -- the local operation is more about sales and marketing. Why did you guys establish a presence in Seattle?

Haroon: I was here, and the company decided to launch our U.S. operations here in Seattle because I was able to recruit the senior management. The icing on the case is that Microsoft is here, AT&T is here, HTC is here, and so it is a bit of a hub as far as being able to draw talent from these companies who have long, long traditions of serving enterprises. So there is a very specific skill set of folks in the marketing, sales, product management functions. There’s a huge talent pool up the street of folks that have been doing this for 25 years.