<story><title>Why I&apos;m Close to Giving Up on Windows Phone 7, as a User and a Developer</title><url>http://blog.dantup.com/2011/03/why-im-close-to-giving-up-on-windows-phone-7-as-a-user-and-a-developer</url><text></text></story><parent_chain><item><author>makecheck</author><text>Microsoft&apos;s an interesting beast.  Things that &quot;should&quot; matter to them, like Windows, somehow reach the point of almost falling apart (see Windows Me or Vista).  Then, groups that are practically losing money build great things like the Xbox 360 and Kinect.  Some products that stumble end up dead, like the Zune, while others are dragged back up to par (see IE9 and Windows 7).  This current mess could mean anything from &quot;WP7 is doomed, sell your stock&quot; to &quot;the Eye of Sauron just hasn&apos;t shone on that product group yet&quot;.  We&apos;ll see.  Personally, I&apos;m thinking WP7 will pull a Vista or two and then become a cool phone OS, but the competition isn&apos;t standing still either.&lt;p&gt;When Apple was launching the iPhone, they pulled engineers from their flagship Mac OS X to work on new phone software.  They seemed to think it was pretty important to launch with a strong product and have all the details right; to them, even delaying a product from another part of their business was an acceptable risk.  When was the last time Microsoft did anything like that?  Instead of slapping together product groups to shove their way into every has-been market, they could stand to divert some developers, developers, developers to products that need a polished launch, such as WP7.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>dasil003</author><text>This pretty much jibes with the conventional wisdom that Microsoft is a company with deep political entanglements.  If something is important, it stands to reason there would be a lot of paralyzing infighting, whereas teams on the periphery could actually do some good work.</text></comment>
<story><title>Why I&apos;m Close to Giving Up on Windows Phone 7, as a User and a Developer</title><url>http://blog.dantup.com/2011/03/why-im-close-to-giving-up-on-windows-phone-7-as-a-user-and-a-developer</url><text></text></story><parent_chain><item><author>makecheck</author><text>Microsoft&apos;s an interesting beast.  Things that &quot;should&quot; matter to them, like Windows, somehow reach the point of almost falling apart (see Windows Me or Vista).  Then, groups that are practically losing money build great things like the Xbox 360 and Kinect.  Some products that stumble end up dead, like the Zune, while others are dragged back up to par (see IE9 and Windows 7).  This current mess could mean anything from &quot;WP7 is doomed, sell your stock&quot; to &quot;the Eye of Sauron just hasn&apos;t shone on that product group yet&quot;.  We&apos;ll see.  Personally, I&apos;m thinking WP7 will pull a Vista or two and then become a cool phone OS, but the competition isn&apos;t standing still either.&lt;p&gt;When Apple was launching the iPhone, they pulled engineers from their flagship Mac OS X to work on new phone software.  They seemed to think it was pretty important to launch with a strong product and have all the details right; to them, even delaying a product from another part of their business was an acceptable risk.  When was the last time Microsoft did anything like that?  Instead of slapping together product groups to shove their way into every has-been market, they could stand to divert some developers, developers, developers to products that need a polished launch, such as WP7.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>kenjackson</author><text>Windows ME was a result of MS moving their top talent to the NT group.  ME should have never been released, but Win2K wasn&apos;t ready to be the consumer OS.&lt;p&gt;When you don&apos;t have the company riding on you, you can take bigger risks.  It will be interesting to see what Windows 8 ends up becoming.  Vista was largely a failure because they were overly ambitious, despite common belief.  I fear that this failure will prevent Windows from being ambitious again.  I hope they learned that they failed for very specific reasons -- not just ambition in of itself.</text></comment>