Microsoft's Windows Phone 7 too little, too late | Hacker News Reader

Microsoft's Windows Phone 7 too little, too late

sfgate.com

21 pointskqr229 comments

What really concerns me about Windows Mobile 7 is the damage it's going to do among mobile web applications. You see, right now, if you want to do a mobile webapp, you can live in HTML5 land with working scripting, working DOM, good CSS3-support and all other goodies.

Sure, there are differences between mobile browsers, but all major platforms are now using webkit of some sort (and for those that don't, Fennec is available which also works really well), so that's a solid foundation to build upon.

And now WP7 arrives, brining us not IE9, not IE8, but IE7 (which by now is 4 years old already) in all its glory.

Up until today, you could get away by just ignoring WM6 and pointing the rare user of that platform to Opera Mobile, but now, there's no more Opera Mobile and the platform is about to get a lot more popular, so your app better works in IE7 too.

This means to either provide two versions of your app, or go back to what we have to do on the desktop too, which is progressive enhancement which sometimes can really destroy the quality of your code and will, again, costs hours upon hours of wasted effort (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1828586).

Thanks Microsoft. Much appreciated.

We can only hope that either:

a) they release an OS update soon next year with an IE9 rendering engine

b) no-one buys the product

I actually suspect that both are likely, at least in Europe.

rooting for b) myself, but I can't post that here on HN, can I? That's not constructive at all.

It's a grey area, I think.

There is little reason to support a platform that appears to break common-sense web apps. To take it to an extreme, would everyone be expected to support (or remain silent about) a new mobile platform that only supported gopher:// ?

> a) they release an OS update soon next year with an IE9 rendering engine

Unlikely - Microsoft's strategy is to fragment every market it can't control and prevent commoditization of the platform layer. The inclusion of a broken IE was probably deliberate.

makes me think...

maybe it's time we developers stood up and said "no".

Let's stand together and declare that "working mobile web" just isn't a feature of WP7. If you want the cool bling of todays mobile web, you'll have to get any other phone aside of WP7. Any will do. Just not WP7.

That's fine, but you pay my salary to feed my family. Thanks!

what I meant was to shift our mindset. At least for me it has always been a matter of honor to support all clients out there as equally well as possible just because that's what we have done on the web ever since.

What I was thinking was to not do it this time around. Now if your customer insists, explain the issue and add the IE tax (I'd say an additional 80% of what you'd charge for the real-browser-only version). If your employer insists, well, then you don't have too many options of course.

"and prevent commoditization of the platform layer"

This is an extremely naive perspective, but one you often hear from a certain type of crowd.

Really it's not about quote/unquote preventing this specific layer. It is about preventing commoditization of where profit/revenue is derived. And every company does it.

Try to commodotize mobile apps and the app store and see what Apple does. Try to have an open ad market where all revenue goes to non-profits, and see what Google does.

And frankly the reaction from all of these companies should be to show they can accelerate faster than the commodotized market. When MS does it, it's called embrace and extend. When Apple does it, its called "we've patented all over this thing and its the next great thing" and you wait in line for 48 hours to buy it.

And since everybody does it, how is this perspective naïve? How would it be unexpected to see Microsoft sabotaging web applications since they can run on every device regardless of the OS/browser and that eliminates their grip on customers?

They screwed themselves with this. There are already a lot of web apps that target iOS and Android and other forward thinking browsers. The majority of the current phones are NOT WinPhone 7, which means that Microsoft is insane if they'd expect the market to adhere to them. If they want to dictate they need to have market share and traction first, but they don't.

No no Microsoft, not this time!

I amused/depressed by all the supposedly tech-savvy bloggers who are pleasantly surprised that the vast majority of the web works on WinMob7 despite it not having much modern HTML5/CSS3 support.

They seem blissfully unaware that Internet Explorer on the desktop is the boat anchor holding all these sites back from deploying these technologies and that they're now adding a second flank with this mobile browser throwback.

I spoke with someone who was able to play around with a pre-release device and their verdict was the included browser actually behaved more like IE6 than IE7.

Too early to write them off too.

Even if Windows Phone 7 is not significantly better than the iPhone and Android competition is a good thing, right? I've played with a device in store and it seems OK-to-good in comparison to my iPhone 4 (which is quite good). I think consumers will be better off if Windows Phone 7 is a credible phone platform, regardless of whether they actually ever use it because it will keep iPhone and Android improving.

There is still Blackberry, webOS, and Nokia. Already lots of competition. Adding Microsoft doesn't hurt but it's probably not helping much at this point.

Also, I think Apple and Google know they need to improve, regardless of the competition. They are both strong players vying to be the #1 in smart phones.

It seems like an interesting phone, and with all the money MS has they are going to buy a lot of partnerships, marketting deals with it. A lot of people could buy this thing and more important, will be used as an experiment for the desktop.

I don't like it, through, I think the interface is so ugly(like the zune external design), and the proof that MS guys had become lazy bastards that just care about making stuff fast. Who knows, maybe people don't care about detail.

This may give RIM some competition in the mobile enterprise space.

really? Isn't all the PR about WP7 really focussed on the consumer? You don't read at all about the enterprise features (does it even have any?), but all is full of Facebook, media sharing and stuff.

I think he meant it as competing for the third place. I know RIM still sells a lot of smartphones, but it seems reasonably obvious it won't recover ground once it's lost to iPhone and Android.

Office hub, SharePoint integration - yes, there's plenty there in the enterprise space. I wouldn't be surprised if there wasn't a way to extend Active Directory group policy to the devices already, or in the next update or 2.

I found the UI unappealing and the heavy use of rotation effects amateurish.

Is this the best they can do? Draw rectangles...

Vertical list of applications??? Microsoft what have you been smoking?

And sorry but I just can't shake the feeling that the UI looks like some half-baked demo.

Microsoft should have just copied the iPhone and Android, they would have had a lot more success.

If they had done that, I am sure you would have commented here saying it looks like a cheap imitation. Have you actually used the phone?

That's my problem with Microsoft software ... they get hyped months or years in advance with nobody actually using the damn product.

And when a product is hyped, you've got to expect a backslash when it doesn't support basic functionality people got accustomed to.

I also think that if third-party integration like Twitter will be less than what Facebook got ... WinMo 7 is basically screwed.

My understanding is that any app can register itself for any of the hubs, so I don't see any technical reason why a twitter app can't go in the people hub.

No clue whose over-sight it is that the twitter app isn't already there.

> they get hyped months or years in advance

Remember how cool was WinFS?

There are stuff that these OS-es got right, and there is no known better way. Not doing the same just for the sake of not being called a copycat is a stupid thing to do. The perfect counter argument for these is: "that's what people were used to"

This all only holds up if there is no known better way.

Cheap imitation used to be an MS strength. A $200equivalent of the iphone V1 would be welcome.

I think it's actually quite cool that Microsoft invented a new UI, instead of copying iPhone/Android. I haven't played with it yet, so I haven't seen the result, but I like that they are trying to do something new, instead of copying others.

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