May 10
1
Microsoft is taking a lot of risks with its forthcoming Windows Phone 7 platform. To be fair, the ‘Softies had little choice. Windows Mobile has steadily lost significant market share to the point where it’s no longer a major player in the overall market for smartphones. The question is no longer whether Microsoft should’ve embarked on a “Photon” reset — which officials acknowledge the company did a year ago, when it went back to the drawing board with the coming version of the Microsoft mobile platform. Instead, the real question is whether Microsoft has made the right bets in the mobile space.
Microsoft is still trickling out information about Windows Phone 7. But here’s a list of some of the biggest risks the company is taking:
- Tailoring the platform for consumers rather than for business users. (Yes, I know the ‘Softies are saying Windows Phone 7 devices are being designed for both consumer and business use. But the reality is that Windows Mobile is Microsoft’s enterprise mobile play and Windows Phone 7 is its consumer play.)
- Going with an entirely new — and far more locked-down — UI known as Metro, which Microsoft pioneered with Media Center and the Zune HD.
- Deciding against providing cut-and-paste functionality in the first release of the Windows Phone 7 platform.
- Opting against enabling multitasking for third-party applications.
- Selecting Silverlight and XNA as the development environments for Windows Phone 7, meaning programmers will have to create applications using managed code and using only the C# programming language.
- Providing no backward compatibility, meaning Windows Mobile 6.x apps (even Microsoft apps, like Microsoft Office Mobile 2010) need to be rewritten to run on the new mobile platform.
- Requiring all application downloads and purchases to go through the Windows Phone Marketplace.
Read the rest of the article here.
What are your thoughts? Frustrated with Microsoft’s direction? Eagerly awaiting Windows Phone Series 7 or whatever the name-of-the-month the OS is?
