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Why I'm Close to Giving Up on Windows Phone 7, as a User and a Developer

blog.dantup.com

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Re: Why I'm Close to Giving Up on Windows Phone 7, as a User and a Developer

#71

Post by rbanffy »

recoiledsnake wrote: post #68
rbanffy wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This IE9? http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2326048 edit: I predict severe downvoting once people start arriving at their offices in Redmond...

The standard is constantly in flux and IE has long dev, testing, beta and release candidate cycles because they need to be backward compatible for the sake of companies. If IE9 implements it, there's a danger of people developing sites that implement workarounds and fixes and will break when the issues are fixed.(i.e back to ie6 days). For the new features here is the labs version: http://html5labs.interoperabilitybr…

> If you're getting downvoted for bashing MS, then you must be doing something wrong, like being way off base with your hate or something.

No joke, sadly.

While I get carried away sometimes (Windows has improved a lot since my windows 2003 days, WP7 is neither "Vista Phone 7" nor "WinMo 7") I see very frequent downmods when I paint Microsoft technologies in unfavorable light, most of them occurring early in the morning PST (I live in GMT-3, so I post a lot before US west coast wakes up). Since I have been very active these days, most posts where this happened are buried deep in the threads pages and may take some time to unearth.

To be fair, I also notice some backlash when I paint Apple in unfavorable colors too.

Re: Why I'm Close to Giving Up on Windows Phone 7, as a User and a Developer

#72

Post by smiler »

mattmanser wrote: post #49
xentronium wrote: post #22

I am not in any position to give advice to Microsoft, but it seems to me that they are trying to apply the winning strategies they used in one game to all the others. Example: WP7. What is expected: They ship fast and they update fast and agile, they don't have giant compatibility legacy to maintain. What actually happens: WP7 took forever to ship and never got updated. My speculation why it happened: they've got som…

I don't think that's their strategy generally. Their current development strategy for things like MVC and Silverlight is to pre-release new functionality as an unsupported project, full source and iterate fast. They're quite agile in areas. WP7 feels like some one has suddenly put the breaks on it.

It's one thing to ship MVC & Silverlight as unsupported projects and iterate fast, but quite another to iterate phone software quickly where you could potentially brick millions of phones with one small software update.

As noted in this blog post, an update applied to the phone broke it and the user had to get a brand new phone. This added a customer service burden to the mobile provider / network - which in turn means they will moan to Microsoft when they do this and give them less enthuiasm for WP7 devices in future if it keeps happening.

Re: Why I'm Close to Giving Up on Windows Phone 7, as a User and a Developer

#73

Post by JonoW »

masklinn wrote: post #66
recoiledsnake wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why? They're already close to having IE9 on the phone.

They still have not managed to roll out their first update, containing critical bug fixes. This does not exactly bode well for IE9 rolling out at all. And then the mobile webkits not only have pretty damn good support for actually displaying pages but have made quite monstrous performance improvements recently.

Which critical bug fixes are these? I've owned and used a WP7 since a few days after launch, all of the bugs are in the "annoyance" category, I don't know of any absolute show-stoppers.

Re: Why I'm Close to Giving Up on Windows Phone 7, as a User and a Developer

#74

Post by bostonpete »

kenjackson wrote: post #9
Legion wrote: post #4

tl;dr: Guy keeps buying shitty MS mobile products, MS dutifully keeps making shitty mobile products. Very reminiscent of Apple fans in the '90s, buying crap products because they've defined themselves to be on Team Apple.

That's possibly the worst most inaccurate tldr I've seen. Did you read the article or just project what you'd like it to say. You do no one any favors by posting an inaccurate tldr.

tl;dr: Legion's tl;dr sucked.

Re: Why I'm Close to Giving Up on Windows Phone 7, as a User and a Developer

#75

Post by recoiledsnake »

prr wrote: post #62
recoiledsnake wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That sounds realistic for a nascent platform. Even a super awesome OS will take time to displace the incumbents. You're disappointed that you didn't get BS marketing speak that it would defeat Apple and Google in 2 weeks or what?

> You're disappointed that you didn't get BS marketing speak that it would defeat Apple and Google in 2 weeks http://www.engadget.com/2010/09/10/microsoft-celebrates-wind... I'll just leave that there ;)

Where's the marketing speak there?

That seems to be an internal joke for the team after their hard work over 2 years for meeting the deadline of the 2010 holiday season and to "rally the troops".

Re: Why I'm Close to Giving Up on Windows Phone 7, as a User and a Developer

#76

Post by recoiledsnake »

rbanffy wrote: post #71
recoiledsnake wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The standard is constantly in flux and IE has long dev, testing, beta and release candidate cycles because they need to be backward compatible for the sake of companies. If IE9 implements it, there's a danger of people developing sites that implement workarounds and fixes and will break when the issues are fixed.(i.e back to ie6 days). For the new features here is the labs version: http://html5labs.interoperabilitybr…

> If you're getting downvoted for bashing MS, then you must be doing something wrong, like being way off base with your hate or something. No joke, sadly. While I get carried away sometimes (Windows has improved a lot since my windows 2003 days, WP7 is neither "Vista Phone 7" nor "WinMo 7") I see very frequent downmods when I paint Microsoft technologies in unfavorable light, most of them occurring early in the morni…

Well, I've seen most posts/stories critical of MS going up highly.

Not so for Apple comments/stories.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1800253

http://mattmaroon.com/2010/11/23/i-quit-hacker-news/

Re: Why I'm Close to Giving Up on Windows Phone 7, as a User and a Developer

#77

Post by astrodust »

rch wrote: post #70

I'm happy to see a thoughtful, objective post on WP7 by a generally pro-MS developer. Well done.

It's got the same flavor of sadness that an Amiga ST fan has when describing their favorite computer.

I hate to say it but by the time Windows Phone 8 comes out, if it ever does, the iPhone, Android and quite possibly RIM will be way ahead. Seems like 2013 at the absolute earliest for Microsoft.

Re: Why I'm Close to Giving Up on Windows Phone 7, as a User and a Developer

#78

Post by astrodust »

swilliams wrote: post #17

The marketing for Windows Phone 7 was pretty extensive in the US. I don't watch much TV, but I definitely saw plenty of the "We need a phone to save us from our phones" ads. Was it really that much smaller in the UK? And have there really been NO bugfixes or patches (other than the notorious one he mentioned)? That's insane. Microsoft has got to know how far behind the ball they are... why aren't they pulling out all…

All I ever see is ads for "Cloud vs. Claude" and none of them make any sense. Microsoft cloud computing for editing photos? Huh?

Re: Why I'm Close to Giving Up on Windows Phone 7, as a User and a Developer

#79

Post by allwein »

JonoW wrote: post #73
masklinn wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They still have not managed to roll out their first update, containing critical bug fixes. This does not exactly bode well for IE9 rolling out at all. And then the mobile webkits not only have pretty damn good support for actually displaying pages but have made quite monstrous performance improvements recently.

Which critical bug fixes are these? I've owned and used a WP7 since a few days after launch, all of the bugs are in the "annoyance" category, I don't know of any absolute show-stoppers.

Well I have to think that the SMS cache corruption bug mentioned in the article would be considered critical.

Re: Why I'm Close to Giving Up on Windows Phone 7, as a User and a Developer

#80

Post by JonoW »

JonoW wrote: post #73
masklinn wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They still have not managed to roll out their first update, containing critical bug fixes. This does not exactly bode well for IE9 rolling out at all. And then the mobile webkits not only have pretty damn good support for actually displaying pages but have made quite monstrous performance improvements recently.

Which critical bug fixes are these? I've owned and used a WP7 since a few days after launch, all of the bugs are in the "annoyance" category, I don't know of any absolute show-stoppers.

That's hardly a widely experienced problem. Google "windows phone 7 text messages corrupt"; first result is a MS answers submission by DanTup - the same guy who's blog is referenced in the HN post.
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