Microsoft Launches Windows Phone 7 But Does Anyone Care?
techcrunch.com
techcrunch.com
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, whereas Apple is trying to prolong the life of an old platform.
The iOS folks got to start from near scratch, building on the foundation they already knew so well.
And I'd say they did a pretty great job.
Not only that, but I recall dismissing Xbox because Microsoft was so late to the game for video-game consoles that I thought they couldn't possibly have any impact.
Boy, how wrong I was...
Basically if I'm going to develop my hip new mobile app that's ready to take over the world I'm going to start with Android and iPhone and wait and see what OS I'm going to tackle next, and the way I'm going to figure that out is by sales numbers and right now even there are more Palm devices then WP7.
Microsoft already have huge developer mindshare. All they have to do is get developers that already use their platforms to use yet another of their platforms.
Android, iOS, Blackberry, etc.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
- 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#
- The built in controls look great and are surprisingly functional. I specifically thinking of the Panorama control - which allows application content to basically flow off screen. Some may find that style of having content get cut off by the edge of the display off-putting, but its effective if that truncated content is limited to titles.
- putting XNA in there is great, mostly for familiarity's sake. You still have to design for the phone differences (form factor, input, and library). Porting games over from XBox live probably won't require an enormous app-rewrite. Can't wait to see how this particular piece plays out.
The one drawback I can see has to do with Windows Phone store. I'm not really sure what the story is there. Is app distribution really limited to the store? How about enterprise apps?
I don't have experience developing iPhone or Android apps, so I won't comment on whether or not WP7 is better in that department.
I hope it's better than Apple's solution.
What we keep begging them for is the ability to point out users at our own enterprise app store, hosted on either Apple's servers or our own. It's also what I keep telling MS whenever I get a chance.
(PS: Send me an email? Would love to hear what you're working 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: they really need polish.
Microsoft has been notoriously bad about leaving all kinds of holes in their products, so that they look OK on stage but end up feeling clunky as hell. If they are to have a chance this time, it is important that their phones feel simple and logical; and, dare I say it, they should even be a joy to use. Microsoft will never earn my respect until they can prove that they get this, and deliver it.
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.
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...)
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 will flock to the Win7 Phones unless they are just horrible once they get going.
Many game companies can target this platform much more easily than the iPhone/Android handsets as it also works off XNA.
Seems like its lack of OpenGL offsets that a good bit... yes, a lot of Xbox/Windows games will be easy to port, but it seems like more ports will likely to be coming from iPhone/Android.
My point is the tools don't matter as much as the strategy and decisions of Microsoft in other parts of the ecosystem to attract talent to produce content for their devices.
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)
I must admit though, I'm mostly excited to write mobile apps in C# and use XNA.
I've also played around with the Google Nexus One and the HTC Incredible. While they're great phones in their own right, the touch screen experience leaves a lot to be desired (atleast on those units) in terms of response time and accuracy + the camera on nexus one is nowhere near the iphone 3GS, forget iPhone 4.
Disclaimer: I have been using the iPhone since the past 3 years and currently on the iPhone 4. I think it's time that I tried a new platform because I'm simply bored of how the phone looks and how it operates (launch an app, exit an app, etc. for everything). I like the way multitasking is implemented and how well the camera performs. I've always had the craving for a hardware keyboard and it seems like the new Dell phone with WP7 is a good replacement for my phone, probably early next year.
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.
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.
MS won't kill this. I wouldn't let that be a factor on doing development. Now it may take a while for it to get consumer uptake. That may temper if you want to develop for it. But given that this device should sell moderately well with a good app store, it may have better ROI than the same app showing up in the Android app store, even with the larger number of Android devices.
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.
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).
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.
Disclosure: I'm the project lead for Renraku, so I have a bit of a vested interest in seeing that happen.
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.
Removing native code from 3rd party apps gives them several things:
1) Reduces incidence of memory leaks.
2) Less buggy apps w/ better type safety than C/C++.
3) Improved security. No buffer overruns or out of range subscript class of vulns.
4) Can more easily statically analyze to determine resource usage and inappropriate usage.
5) Can change the underlying HW platform and apps continue to run.
The only real issue I've seen with managed code in the past is perf. And from the game demos I've seen, I think they may have fixed that issue.
There's a major new version of the dev environment underway, Xcode 4, which developers can already try for themselves: http://developer.apple.com/technologies/tools/whats-new.html