Microsoft has released Home Team, an experimental Windows Phone app for word-of-mouth recommendations

Microsoft has released Home Team, an experimental Windows Phone app for word-of-mouth recommendations

Microsoft has launched a new mobile app designed to help you search local service professional, from plumbers and electricians to car-dealers and more.

Above: Home Team

Home Team is the latest in a long line of apps to emerge from the vaults of Microsoft Garage, the computing giant’s lab for experimental tinkering. However, unlike most of its other recent launches, Microsoft has opted to go Windows Phone-only with this app.
Back in July, Microsoft Garage launched a new polling app for iOS and Android, shortly before it introduced a lightweight email app for iPhone called Send, which later arrived for Android too. Elsewhere, the company rolled out Snipp3t, an iOS-only app that gathers celebrity news from across the Web. Then there’s the Next Lock Screen app for Android and Picturesque, another lock screen app designed with Microsoft’s Bing search engine in mind. Journeys & Notes, on the other hand, is a social travel app that seeks to connect a community of users who have traveled on similar routes.
Home Team is all about finding the best “local contractors and repairmen” that come with “a stamp of approval” — this is all about word-of-mouth recommendations between friends and family, rather than reviews from the general public.
With Microsoft long on the back-foot in the mobile realm, it hasn’t been investing quite as much in Windows Phone ecosystem of late — in fact, it has rather a lot of apps that exist on other mobile platforms but not Windows Phone. So it’s interesting to see it rollout a Windows Phone-only app, even if it is just one of its experiments. It’s safe to say that if it garners enough favorable feedback through the testing phase, that it may find its way onto other mobile platforms too.