After discussions with jailbreakers, Microsoft opening up WP7 | Hacker News Reader

After discussions with jailbreakers, Microsoft opening up WP7

techeye.net

4 pointsrodh2577 comments

I realize the title isn't the same as the article, but I hate the title of this article, I'm fairly sure that some random coders didn't force Microsoft to make a major change to their new platform.

I agree. The original title was too ambiguous. The article does make it clear what happened, though.

One of the commenters there says that Microsoft is finally seeing sense about these things, but I think it's probably just 2 isolated cases. They will continue to make the same mistake in the future, even though the open-ness of Windows was what created their empire.

Time will tell, though.

I would imagine they're hearing earfuls from developers. They're really talking to us alot. As in, I've personally talked to them for about it for 90 minutes.

yeah I think that is the real case, especially given that WM6 wasn't locked down, I went to one of the early previews of WP7 a while back and there was a lot of angry WM6 enterprise developers about this issue, and all the MS representatives agreed with them.

Amazing news - I wonder if this will give WP7 the lift it needs to compete with iOS and Android?

I saw my first WP7 mobile in the flesh today, and I was impressed - but without the backing of developers it could be a niche product.

Question to coders out there; Will this make a difference to you? Will you now have a go at coding for WP7 - or will you be waiting to see if the phone is a commercial success before testing the waters?

I probably will not attempt to code for WP7.

However, if it weren't open, there is absolutely no chance than I'd attempt to code for it, since I don't own one and don't plan to. iPhone is in the same category.

Android... I probably will. (Both because it's open, and because I own one.)

Honestly, the fact you can run most XNA-Xbox360 code without any code changes I think pushes into a ready made game porting group.

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