Competition is good and I hope this forces Google and Apple to continue innovating...
However, I've seen demos of this phone OS and it looks pretty awful to use. Maybe you have to be using it in person and physically holding the device to like it, who knows.
The OS seems to be a love it or hate it thing. I love the way it looks in the demos, but I don't think I'll buy one. There are a few things that worry me, such as the lack of a removable microSD card, no true multi-tasking, and no copy/paste. My last 2 phones were Windows Mobile, but I recently jumped ship to Android with my HTC Evo, and I'm not going back. Microsoft had their chance, and they lost me.
I've held and used a couple of the earlier WP7 models.
The UI looks odd, but it worked really well for me and I stopped noticing that initial awkward look almost immediately. I had no trouble at all navigating around, even though I was unfamiliar with where I should be going. It may have even been more discoverable and intuitive than my first iPhone experience.
That said, unless there's some phenomenal hardware that's yet to be announced, I don't see myself trading my iPhone 4 in for a WP7. It's a gigantic leap forward from WinMo 6.5 though.
I was at Maker's Faire in May. Microsoft was there demoing Sync ( mobile apps )for Ford automobiles.
They had a guy who had built a aiming mechanism for a t shirt cannon by using the tilt controls on the Win 7 phone. He was using the .Net api's from the phone to control the t-shirt cannon via Microsoft's Robotics studio api. I was rather impressed.
I saw that same demo booth at Maker Faire - except that I never saw the demo. The two or three times I stopped by that booth they were waiting for someone to bring something or out of tshirts. It was a neat-looking contraption, though, but I'm not ready to fully appreciate it until I see it shooting the shirts.
Microsoft have been consistently failing to impresses in the mobile space; I will wait till the actual product is released before getting excited.
Android devices are doing great, iPhone is doing great and it is not about a single product anymore. Developers and the ecosystem is very important in deciding the fate of devices in this space. I have a feeling that Microsoft may be already out of the game.
We'll have to see where things are in a year or so. Microsoft does have a few areas where they may be able to pick up iPhone users:
1) iPhone fatigue. I know a number of people who are tired of their iPhones for one reason or another and either have switched (generally to Android) or will be switching when they can. Obviously Android will get a lot of these, but not necessarily all of them.
2) If gaming works well, and there's integration with XBox Live, they could start to pick up gamers. --I doubt anyone really expected Microsoft to be able to rival Nintendo or Sony when the XBox first came out, but it happened.
3) Business users. Granted, many business people love RIM, but if Microsoft is able to provide a fuller experience around business, they'll be able to attract users.
I'm not going to try to predict the success or failure of Windows Phone OS, but I'm certainly not going to write them off before the phones are in the wild.
Microsoft has all the pieces to do a really great consumer ecosystem. But they've been fumbling for so long, there's just no good reason to believe a product developed within the bureaucracy can pull it together.
The XBox succeeded largely because it was outside the bureaucracy during its formative stages. And since then, absolutely nothing from inside the bureaucracy has integrated well with it.
. Media integration into the 360 was not good.
. Media Center integration wasn't any better.
. 360/Zune integration was never really attempted.
. Live for Windows/XBox Live integration was not good.
. Live Marketplace/Zune Marketplace integration is more awkward than Live/Netflix.
You're right. They can't execute. They get 90% of the way there and fail.
I'm a Mac / Linux / Android guy. Not a Windows person at all. But I have a Windows media Centre TV and it's awesome.
* I browse upcoming movies on TV by scrolling through a list of movie posters.
* I have Sky pay TV, a DVR, Blu Ray, and Youtube in one interface
* Channels are identified by logos as well as number.
It's a brilliant consumer product. But do you know who sells it in the consumer space?
Nobody.
If you walk into Best Buy or Currys, you'll find boxes from everyone but MS. There's no hardware partners, no Sony no Panasonic no Hitachi WMC boxes. I had to buy a Dell box, a separate remote, and a separate dual tuner. The result is awesome, but there is no part of MS the company that seems to want to stand behind this awesome product.
I've been switching away from WMC, not because I don't like it (it's actually a product MS has done a really good job on), but because it doesn't work as seamlessly with the videos I watch (mkv and iso files). When I was living in the UK and had a DVB tuner, I used it as a PVR and, since I had a smaller TV, the videos I downloaded were avi's and worked fine.
But Microsoft would have to find a way to sell a box that works with the different types of TV reception - satellite, cable, or freeview in the UK, and that wouldn't be easy. (and it would be just as big of a pain in the US where they would be able to sell the most units), so I can understand why they haven't.
Still, it is strange that nobody else has really tried to sell hardware specific to WMC.
The cable/satellite providers control the DVR set-top box market. Resources poured into marketing and distributing the WMC boxes would likely be largely wasted.
Microsoft has in the past made fantastic PDA products. I've owned and used 3 generations of them.But the current crop is just awful. The devices themselves are so-so. The fatal flaw is their synchronization.
For several years now, the only change to Microsoft's ActiveSync application has been to gradually remove features -- and yes, I do mean this literally. When I bought my most recent device, the top-of-the-line iPAQ (that isn't a phone), it came with WM6 and required an upgrade to the most recent ActiveSync, forcing me to abandon the features I'd kept for years just by not upgrading.
But now, on both the computers I (attempt to) connect it with, ActiveSync will not work at all. Several hours of trouble-shooting haven't gotten me anywhere.
Even if my experience is an aberration, the fact that ActiveSync does not (and, according to MS, will not) support Outlook 64-bit can only mean that they already view the platform as a dead end.
If Microsoft won't support ActiveSync on what they claim to be their flagship communication application, how can I possibly invest the money in continued use of WM devices?
On the consumer side, I'll bet they do consider Outlook to be a dead end. --The money is on Live/Hotmail integration for consumers. For businesses, the money is in Exchange integration, at which point it doesn't matter if you are using the 32-bit or 64-bit version of Outlook.
Congrats to the WPS7 team...it's been a long journey.
I'm stuck with my iPhone contract for another year, and I'm hoping that by then the WPS7 OS/ecosystem will have matured to the point that I can feel good about making the switch.
I think what most people fail to understand when it comes to market significance here is the leverage in the developer community. I know most HN people are not MSFT fans but Silverlight is a great technology and the phone dev platform is based on Silverlight. Microsoft has won markets in the past because of developers and they will be strong in the 3rd party application market here. Having had a iPhone for years, now and Android and developed for all three platforms I think that Android is going to be in trouble unless the quality of user experience quickly rises for apps in their market.
Because of contract cycle lengths on phones I think this is a battle that will be waged for at least the next 6 years. Going to be fun!
I got to spend about half an hour playing with a hardware reference device not too long ago. While it was fast (and had the best OSK I've used), the UI was just a complete mess. Navigation was clumsy, and it's almost shocking that MS would bring out a platform without multitasking after even Apple has conceded that point.
The best description I've heard is that it sort of feels like using iPhone 1.5. That was great in 2007, but I don't know how it's going to fly in 2010/2011 given it's going up against a growing iOS and Android, an entrenched RIM, and potential for HP to breathe new life into the superior WebOS.
Microsoft continues to long pre-announce their products - the first US widgets are November? - which implies they're going to continue to under-deliver on their execution, to detract from the work of all the bright people over there, to follow the everything-is-named-Windows branding, and to generally disappoint their customers.
This RTM on the same day where Jobs announced two iOS releases within the same range when WP7 products are expected.
And what else Apple and Android or HP (with WebOS) might or will deploy before the Microsoft partners ship products built from this Microsoft RTM announcement?
Time to start managing their customer expectations down, as is their inexplicable wont?
I think in this case they had a tough call to make, and I think they made the right one. They either keep it under wraps, and not get dev tools and SDK coverage. Or they announce early and launch with a relatively strong ecosystem out the gate.
I think they've built up a decent amount of anticipation for their devices. And on the dev side I only know slightly more iOS devs than WP7 devs right now (and far more than Android devs). That's kind of crazy since there are 120M iOS devices and no WP7 devices shipped. I wouldn't be surprised if others were seeing a similar phenomena.
And remember MS kept Kin underwraps until a month before shipping, and you see how well that went. :-)
I think WM7 will be at least a modest success for Microsoft. The Android handset makers are pushing the platform in a weird direction. Larger handsets & more software complexity. I think there's probably a lot of people out there who don't want either an iPhone or an Android device for various reasons. Most of them are probably RIM users today due to the simplicity of BBOS. WM7 will be a legitimate option for them. I could see WM7 having a 10-20% market share within a few years.
I think Microsoft has a lot riding on this platform and as such they'll be pumping a lot of cash into the marketing and promotion of this release. From a software standpoint, I'm quite excited about the .NET experience I'll be able to harness in order to create apps -- Microsoft will be able to leverage existing .NET developers like me to quickly grow the Windows Phone app catalog.
As far as the interface is concerned, I like it. It's different and data-centric, unlike most of the alternatives.
On a side note, this is one of the most well-formatted blogs that I've seen from Microsoft. I usually find MS blog posts very hard to read, and usually end up not doing so.
However, I've seen demos of this phone OS and it looks pretty awful to use. Maybe you have to be using it in person and physically holding the device to like it, who knows.