Microsoft 'screwed up' Windows Mobile

Nothing new here, Microsoft has totally screwed up every version of Windoze since 1.0.

Once again, blowmer shows his ignorance with the fundamental issue behind yet another piece of MS bloatware. The issue isn't that they "should have WM7 out" by now, the issue is they failed to capture the developers mindshare that WM7 is worth writing apps for. Forget it, MS, game over - Apple & Google will continue to erode your market share with better UI, more developers, and open sauce programmming...

This is what really happened ...

You sat on your backsides and did no innovation, no research and precious little bug fixing because you thought you had the market wrapped up and your customers were tied to your products.

Then someone else came along with some real inspiration, so now you are going to steal their ideas and hope that your existing market share will carry you through until your competitors go bust competing with the new products you copied from them.

Scott, developers simply go where the customers are. Windows Mobile had the bulk of smart phone developers on their ship for YEARS. There were hardly any smartphones sold however. Then a little thing called the iPhone came out. The problem with Windows Mobile is several: all the successful platforms have been integrated phone/os systems but WM is an OS only. This is not allowing for tight enough feature integration and a seamless enough experience. Third party OEMS just haven't been producing high enough quality products. The OS has been too much like a mini version of windows and not enough like a PHONE! Maybe MS needs to make a complete phone system to get a compelling system out there.

Gee, could it be those royalties the phone mfgs don't want to pay, the extra hardware expense for more memory and a faster processor to handle the bloat, or perhaps was it general stability issue with all LoseDoze O/S product?

Or maybe it was simply a matter of the availability real competition - Micr0$ucks has no concept of competing in an environment where there are viable alternatives. The business model of "Screw the Customer" doesn't work so well when the customer can dump you for someone else all too easy...

HB

all you can do is bitch. noone here can say that he worked on anything remotely as complicated.
we are all human after all and make mistakes. even the best QA and best project management can't solve this. looking at the complexity of widows i see tremendous effort of analysts, dev, qa and surrounding teams and i take my head of before these people. yeah, their product is not without flaw but so we all as human are.

Rich Wargo, until you can show that you made anything better feel free to shut it.

I truly respect the tremendous effort of Microsoft's analysts, devs, etc., because many of them do a great job and produce some marvelous stuff. That doesn't prevent me from despising company's nasty bussines practices. The world of computing would have been much more enjoyble had Gates/Balmer not poluted it badly with their evil.

Some examples ? These are two of them that came into my mind:

1, Visual Studio 2005 had a bug preventing me from utilizing ClickOnce technology. MS's answer : "we'll fix it in the next version" (which was to be bought for quite a lot of money and which introduced quite a lot of extra bugs)

2, MS's attitude of ignoring and subverting standards : XHTML, DOM, SVG, ODF, ... Hampering the interoperation for the nasty sake of monopolizing the market is the name of the game.

The part that I really don't understand is that Palm, with almost no engineering resources, build from the ground up an absolutely awesome mobile operating system in two years.

Precisely what are Microsoft doing when Palm can beat them to market?

Aside from the "questionable" business practices - and I phrase it this way because ethics is a long gone business concept - Micr0$ucks puts out crap quality products, plain and simple. They expect you to pay for the bug fixes with the following release of said product.

Notice Ballmer's point of view of the alleged screw-up was timing of release, not product features, not bug fixes, not quality of product. They were only concerned with perception and sales.

Most companies can't get away with the "Screw the Customer" business model, but when you have a monopoly it sure makes it easier to carry out.

HB

I work for Nokia. Take your pick.

"and i take my head of before these people."

i think it's for the best