Microsoft: 1.5 million Windows Phone 7 handsets sold in first six weeks

I'm not against Microsoft as player in this space, per se.. but what worries me most about the prospect of the rise of WP7 in terms of marketshare is the simply having to support their [historically] awful browsers.

Blah-blah-let-the-market-drive-innovation, I know. Microsoft could, potentially, drive innovation in the html5 space with their entry into the market (especially given the sorta-monoculture around WebKit (a dualopoly-at-best between Apple and Google)). It's fair to say that, in the late 90s and early 2000s, MS did drive some innovation in the browser space. And then they stopped. For like five years.

Anyone with more than a few years experience in the web (especially in the enterprise space) has had to write enough crufty client code to support horrible IE6 corner-cases. I just hope history doesn't repeat itself with WP7's browser.

And say what you want about iOS vs Android, but at least both platforms are running very similar (WebKit-based) browser technologies. This makes things like Zepto.js (with a stated "we're only supporting WebKit for now, so quit asking about gecko" policy) feasible in terms of offering rich mobile functionality. The appearance of WP7 as a viable contender throws a spanner in the works, in this regard.

Does anyone have any insight into how good/bad the WP7's browser support is for a lot of stuff people are doing in the mobile app space (backbone, etc), compared to existent mobile functionality present in iOS and Android?

1.5 million sold to carriers and retailers != 1.5 million sold to customers

My prognostication: Microsoft will get huge market-share, but will do so largely at the expense of RIM/Blackberry.

RIM could respond by extracting the good parts of the Blackberry infrastructure and licensing these to companies with Android phones and by exploiting greater openness on the Windows Phone 7 platform. In essence, RIM gets out of the device business and transitions into the business mobile networking infrastructure business using various platforms as a substrate.