If I remember the numbers, leading up to the WP7 launch, MS dropped roughly 100 million on marketing. They sold less than 100,000 units on launch week. Whatever the exact numbers, I remember someone pointing out it would have been more cost effective to give the phones away for the launch. It's still that way today. They have no mindshare of the public at large, nor the developers, nor the carriers, nor the handset m…
> Microsoft has to do something that's _compellingly_ better, to someone, somewhere, on some basis that makes money. $20 says Microsoft will take over the mobile enterprise market from the now weak grasp of RIM, by focusing on security and enterprise features. Enterprises care about security. They want someone who owns the platform they can thump in the head when something goes wrong. They want complicated features t…
Re: The Critics Rave... for Microsoft?
#71Of the smartphone OSes and hardware currently available, only RIM has what I'd consider good security, and Apple iOS is pretty good. Android and WP7.5 have basically no hardware-based protection, and given the UI/UX of the phone, it's unreasonable for people to use passphrases resistant to offline brute force attacks -- all the work factor stuff with scrypt/bcrypt/etc. doesn't apply when you have a huge asymmetry between normal use hardware (slow, cheap, low power phone) and attacker (general purpose CPU attached to the wall).