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Microsoft Launches Windows Phone 7 But Does Anyone Care?

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Re: Microsoft Launches Windows Phone 7 But Does Anyone Care?

#31

Post by TheIronYuppie »

I'm with the crew that thinks it's pretty short sighted to just dismiss this out of hand. Last time I checked, Xbox launched into a market place where people change their consoles a lot less frequently, with a single ENORMOUS player, and they've done pretty well for themselves.

The question is whether or not they get the amazing partnerships with HW/SW that Apple has driven into the iPhone and let them crush design. Without that, it'll be good, but not great and will not win the hipsters/design freaks.

Re: Microsoft Launches Windows Phone 7 But Does Anyone Care?

#32

Post by TheIronYuppie »

tomh- wrote: post #16
gte910h wrote: post #5

Tons of people prefer the Microsoft environment. Neither Google nor Apple have offered many of these people what they want in a dev environment. Apple's required an odd language up until very recently, and even the C# language you can write to doesn't do many of the things they're used to doing C# in. Android's development resources are capable, but Eclipse is a far cry from Visual Studio... I assume tons of people w…

The tools don't matter, it might be nice, but even though "tons of people prefer the Microsoft environment" I can't recall the last time they produced a product having superior user experience thanks to those tools. I can't name a single website/webapp/desktop app that I enjoy using on a daily base made with visual studio. I know a lot of the game companies use visual studio (c++) to produce parts of their games, but…

Sorry, totally disagree. Tools matter. A LOT. Being able to build my LOB app in VB and launch on a company's phones = huge win for IT Departments.

The world isn't all about consumers and flash. Whether or not they can win that market is an open question, but they'll make a dent. And Blackberry has built a very successful business doing just that (doing ok with consumers and crushing enterprise)

Re: Microsoft Launches Windows Phone 7 But Does Anyone Care?

#33

Post by runjake »

The initial reviews have been great (even from Apple fanatics like Gruber, Mossberg, and Pogue). The WP7 development environment is great and utilizes APIs with a wealth of existing experience out there.

Sure they were late to the game, but from what I can see, they'll already become a player. The same dismissals were issued against Microsoft for other late-comers-that-became-hits like the XBOX series, Active Directory, and .NET.

Re: Microsoft Launches Windows Phone 7 But Does Anyone Care?

#34

Post by dinedal »

icey wrote: post #29
dinedal wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The real question is, is this the next Xbox, or is it the next Silverlight?

They're both successful projects - Silverlight's adoption is still increasing. I'm not sure what your point is?

I am unable to locate any hard numbers for the adoption rates of Silverlight (there doesn't appear to be any officially published figures), but something tells me it's a lot less then the 41.7 million 360's sold.

I think that you're right that both are "successful." But I believe I'm not alone in thinking that the 360 was a far greater success.

edit: Further research shows 56% of browsers for September sport Silver light (http://www.statowl.com/custom_ria_market_penetration.php), but this is hard to compare apples to apples. Personally, to me a ~$300 purchase is worth a lot more then a free plug-in download anyway in terms of how successful something is.

Re: Microsoft Launches Windows Phone 7 But Does Anyone Care?

#35

Post by bad_user »

eogas wrote: post #8

I think it's fantastic. As someone who has done a decent bit of iPhone development, I can definitely say that I prefer developing in VS with C# than XCode with Objective-C. It's disheartening that so many bloggers are dismissing this awesome platform simply because Microsoft is "late to the game", yet they forget how successful Android has been. At this point, it looks like Google and Microsoft are fresh and new, whe…

It's not you, the developer, that's important. The customers buying the phones are.

Regular people already know about Android / iPhone. There are already cheap Android phones on sale (you can buy an unlocked Android phone, with no contract, for $300 ... see HTC Wildfire).

And many people are buying these phones for the apps available. For consumers the iPhone is king. Android is playing catch-up (but it is doing OK).

And speaking about regular people, my wife owns a WinMo 6.5 phone that will not see an official upgrade to 7 because it doesn't have the right hardware. And all apps for WinMo 6.x will have to suffer complete rewrites. So all the developers working on WinMo 6.x apps have just been fucked.

> At this point, it looks like Google and Microsoft are fresh and new, whereas Apple is trying to prolong the life of an old platform.

That's new to me, considering the iPhone 4 is still the best smartphone out there.

Re: Microsoft Launches Windows Phone 7 But Does Anyone Care?

#36

Post by steverb »

luffy wrote: post #9

I'm currently working on several applications for WP7. The development experience for WP7 is a million-billion times better than it was for past Windows Mobile operating systems. - The emulator is snappy and you don't need to mess around with ActiveSync. - I'm not a huge fan of the XAML (the Silverlight/WPF markup language), but that is not an issue. I put a XAML place holder element in place and add controls in C# -…

My limited number of contacts at MS tell me that an Enterprise deployment solution is coming, but they couldn't get it done in time for the initial release.

I hope it's better than Apple's solution.

Re: Microsoft Launches Windows Phone 7 But Does Anyone Care?

#37

Post by [deleted] »

eogas wrote: post #8

I think it's fantastic. As someone who has done a decent bit of iPhone development, I can definitely say that I prefer developing in VS with C# than XCode with Objective-C. It's disheartening that so many bloggers are dismissing this awesome platform simply because Microsoft is "late to the game", yet they forget how successful Android has been. At this point, it looks like Google and Microsoft are fresh and new, whe…

[deleted]

Re: Microsoft Launches Windows Phone 7 But Does Anyone Care?

#38

Post by loire280 »

The worst news about this phone is the web browser: IE7 based with IE8 technology. IE7's still-buggy, slow rendering; glacial Javascript performance; no support for forward-thinking web technologies ("HTML5", canvas or webGL, CSS3). I hope this doesn't take off, or this will ruin the currently fun, Webkit-based mobile web development for modern smartphones..

Also, from a user's perspective: no Flash (at least initially) OR HTML5 video tag support? It's like Microsoft's totally missed the last few years of mobile phone flamewars.

Re: Microsoft Launches Windows Phone 7 But Does Anyone Care?

#39

Post by jordan0day »

icey wrote: post #29
dinedal wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The real question is, is this the next Xbox, or is it the next Silverlight?

They're both successful projects - Silverlight's adoption is still increasing. I'm not sure what your point is?

What follows is entirely opinion and based on little-to-no research, so if I'm way off I apologize:

I'm not sure I would classify Silverlight as "successful", just yet. Certainly it's getting buy-in in corporate environments, intranet apps, etc., it's visibility to the public still seems pretty small. Certainly there have been claims made (which I have no reason to doubt) that Silverlight has an install base of > 50% of the PCs on the internet, but I just don't see it having nearly the same "mindshare" as Flash or even HTML5. Now, this may all be a symptom of spending my browsing time on sites like HN and Reddit which are, if not anti-Microsoft, certainly not pro-Microsoft, so take this all with a grain of salt.

Amongst .NET developers Silverlight definitely seems to be popular -- I just don't know what portion of the overall developer population consists of .NET devs. As someone who spends a certain number of hours each day actually working on Silverlight-based stuff, I can say I like Silverlight, and it's the right tool for the job we're using it for.

After some reflection, I'm not sure what I would constitute as "success" in this space, to begin with. Is it driving a big video site like YouTube? I big gaming portal like Kongregate? I'm not sure those are great criteria for evaluating success, so perhaps my initial evaluation is off.

Re: Microsoft Launches Windows Phone 7 But Does Anyone Care?

#40

Post by samstokes »

makecheck wrote: post #4

That article seemed incredibly long for something that failed to tell me even a single thing about the phone, aside from it "looking great" or something. Come on. Though in a way, it almost doesn't matter. Microsoft has to offer the features of iPhone and Android to even be taken seriously, so we have to assume that is just there. What they really need can't be seen through promising text and screenshots, anyway: the…

Microsoft haven't launched a phone. They've launched a new version of their phone OS.
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