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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?

#41

Post by potatolicious »

drdaeman wrote: post #27

I've heard WP7 has no compatibility whatsoever (so it's unable to run even WM5/6 apps)? If that's true — am I understanding properly that MS is introducing almost completely empty platform, which requires software to be written yet? I don't know whenever they will succeed or not, but it seems to be a hard task to enter the market when all rivals already have quite strong positions (including lots of software).

If anything I think that's the move they needed most - to toss everything out and start new.

See for example: OS9 vs. OSX

The problem with MS, constantly, is that they have prioritized backwards compatibility over just about everything else - often usability, stability, and functionality. This has kept their platforms technologically backwards and their usability an infamous joke.

It's about time that MS started fresh with a modern, relevant platform. I just hope they can do something similar with desktop Windows.

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

#42

Post by icey »

jordan0day wrote: post #39
icey wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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%…

I don't think you're off the mark at all.

When I say Silverlight is "successful" I mean that it has gained a reasonable installation base (> 50%) in a short period of time (3 years).

In early 2009, Silverlight's installation base was only 20%, so it's clearly making inroads.

Will Silverlight ever get Flash-like install numbers? I doubt it, but I also don't think it needs to have those numbers in order to be considered successful.

If Microsoft could get the kind of adoption rates for WP7 as it has for Silverlight, I think they would be very pleased. Of course, phones are a little more difficult because it's much more likely to be a binary decision - people can have Flash AND Silverlight at no cost; I doubt there will be many people interested in owning an iPhone / Android phone PLUS a Windows phone.

It's become way too common to see people slagging on Microsoft gear without providing any kind of detail, so I'm just going to start asking them for some kind of backing data.

Now, if the OP had said "is this the next Xbox, or is it the next Kin?", then I probably wouldn't have had anything to say about the matter.

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

#43

Post by Lewisham »

jordan0day wrote: post #39
icey wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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%…

Yeah, I think the problem for Silverlight is that "success" is not a clear idea for such a platform, and if "success" is just large sites using it, then you've got Netflix at least. I'm sure Adobe counts "success" as installed base, but if you were a marketer, the kicking they are getting from the development community is not success at all.

It seems more cut and dried in the phone space. Sell units, make happy customers, sell more units. Android is not necessarily making numbers 2 and 3. We'll see when iPhone hits Verizon.

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

#44

Post by tomh- »

bananaandapple wrote: post #20
tomh- wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I use windows 7 on a daily basis and I enjoy it! And I bet it's made with visual studio.

I totally forgot about Windows somehow, I use it on a daily base too and I'm very happy with it :)

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

#45

Post by daeken »

potatolicious wrote: post #41
drdaeman wrote: post #27

I've heard WP7 has no compatibility whatsoever (so it's unable to run even WM5/6 apps)? If that's true — am I understanding properly that MS is introducing almost completely empty platform, which requires software to be written yet? I don't know whenever they will succeed or not, but it seems to be a hard task to enter the market when all rivals already have quite strong positions (including lots of software).

If anything I think that's the move they needed most - to toss everything out and start new. See for example: OS9 vs. OSX The problem with MS, constantly, is that they have prioritized backwards compatibility over just about everything else - often usability, stability, and functionality. This has kept their platforms technologically backwards and their usability an infamous joke. It's about time that MS started fres…

I'd love to see it happen, but it's not looking great at this point, at least for the near future. It's entirely possible that the Midori project is continuing behind closed doors, but Singularity (the kernel and base runtime) has entirely stagnated from what I've seen. Since they're already working with an open source (if not Free) base, I wonder if they won't just pick up one of the pure-managed OS projects out there and use that (e.g. Cosmos, Renraku, SharpOS, etc).

Disclosure: I'm the project lead for Renraku, so I have a bit of a vested interest in seeing that happen.

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

#46

Post by Samuel_Michon »

potatolicious wrote: post #41
drdaeman wrote: post #27

I've heard WP7 has no compatibility whatsoever (so it's unable to run even WM5/6 apps)? If that's true — am I understanding properly that MS is introducing almost completely empty platform, which requires software to be written yet? I don't know whenever they will succeed or not, but it seems to be a hard task to enter the market when all rivals already have quite strong positions (including lots of software).

If anything I think that's the move they needed most - to toss everything out and start new. See for example: OS9 vs. OSX The problem with MS, constantly, is that they have prioritized backwards compatibility over just about everything else - often usability, stability, and functionality. This has kept their platforms technologically backwards and their usability an infamous joke. It's about time that MS started fres…

I think that's the move they needed most - to toss everything out and start new.

I wholeheartedly agree, and from everything that I've seen of WP7, I'm impressed. MS has rethought the entire UI, and frankly, rebuilding from scratch was the only thing they could do to become relevant again in the consumer mobile space. They've done away with the desktop metaphor, menu bars and contextual menus, and yet they managed not to make it a carbon copy of iOS or WebOS. I can't wait to test it.

However, just a side note about your comparison between OS9>OSX and WM6>WP7: whenever there was a radical change in architecture, Apple provided a transition period where the two coexisted. When Apple switched from 68k processors to PowerPC, developers could build FAT Binaries that would run on both platforms. When Apple switched from MacOS 9 to OS X, MacOS 9 apps could still run within the Classic environment. When Apple switched from PowerPC to Intel processors, PowerPC applications could still be run within a layer called Rosetta.

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

#47

Post by sterwill »

bananaandapple wrote: post #20
tomh- wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I use windows 7 on a daily basis and I enjoy it! And I bet it's made with visual studio.

That may not be a safe assumption.

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

#48

Post by daeken »

runjake wrote: post #33

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 Directo…

I hate to say this, especially as an avid .NET fanboy, but I feel they missed a huge opportunity here. If they would have layered a pure-managed userspace on top of the CE kernel, they could've achieved extremely high performance (shared GC and seriously diminished task switching/IPC overhead) while guaranteeing a huge degree of security at compile-time. In addition, they could've much more easily moved the whole system to be orthogonally persistent, which I believe will play a big roll in the mobile space as tablets get more advanced, particularly.

The benefits of the OS being able to introspect completely on the applications running on it simply can't be overstated. From a security, stability, speed, memory use, and flexibility point of view, they missed the mark. It'd also open up a lot of new avenues in terms of parallelism, which will be a big deal in a few years as we get dual- and quad-core mobile chips. They're coming, and yet again we're not ready for them.

I sincerely hope they go the pure-managed-userspace angle for WP8. If they do, they'll have a tech stack that simply can't be beaten.

(Note: I'm a bit biased here, being the author of a pure-managed OS. But seriously -- these guys really started the trend, why are they not taking full advantage of it? They're already going mostly-managed...)

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

#49

Post by kenjackson »

loire280 wrote: post #38

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 initial…

In head to head comparison, the WP7 browser, in preproduction HW, performed about on par with Android (Nexus One) and iPhone 4 browsers.

I'm sure that with IE9, they'll rev the phone with an HTML5 focused browser in the future. But for todays web, I think a solid IE7/8 browser is something I'm completely fine with. At least for a year or so.

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

#50

Post by daeken »

sterwill wrote: post #47
bananaandapple wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I use windows 7 on a daily basis and I enjoy it! And I bet it's made with visual studio.

That may not be a safe assumption.

But it's a correct one. Razzle is used internally for building the kernel and drivers, but the majority (I believe?) of the userspace is done using VS.
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