Really?

[SysAdmin]

If you remember way back when in September 2010 when M$ shat out the turd known as Windows Phone 7 they had a funeral for other smart phones.

http://www.amiga.org/forums/showthread.php?t=54399&highlight=funeral


Now many many months later the buyers of these phones are pissed they still don't even have minor updates to these Windows phones.


http://www.zdnet.com/blog/hardware/microsoft-to-windows-phone-owners-we-cant-guarantee-anything/12077


Can a Zune or Kin phone like death be far behind? My best guess is M$ no longer cares about Win Phone because sales have been in the gutter.


And ex-Microsoftie has a different insider point of view.

"I used to work at Microsoft, and this state of affairs makes me sad – but doesn’t surprise me in the least bit. In fact, knowing this kind of thing would happen is the main reason I left Microsoft. Culturally, Microsoft simply isn’t capable of competing with companies such as Google and Apple anymore. The culture there can be summed up as “CYA” (cover your ass) as opposed to rapid innovation and strong technical skills. It seems like the Windows Phone team is so politically charged right now, everyone’s just trying to keep from getting screwed on their annual reviews or blamed for the latest mess. There simply isn’t any sense of accountability or personal responsibility. Look at Eric’s post. It’s full of vague, “can’t blame me”, cover your ass language with no real information. And this is exactly how people communicate within Microsoft in their status emails. No one gets blamed for anything, no one gets in trouble, everything is fluid, and this attitude of “oops, oh well!” is ingrained in everyone. Ship date slipped? “Oh well!” Had to cut an important feature? “HAHA…so did we! here have a donut!” Can’t complete the feature that your team committed to and our team was desperately depending on? “Oh who cares? I’ll just cut my feature too and let my manager know!”

http://windowsphonesecrets.com/2011/03/24/first-windows-phone-update-only-going-out-to-unlocked-phones/#comments


When you consider that this update only adds minor features such as copy in paste its a sad state of affairs. Or as M$ put it in their commercials "Really?"

[Franko]

I always thought that's always been the policy at Billy Boys Neverland, cover your ass at all costs and bugger what the sheep who buy their stuff think (or rather don't think) cos their so dumb they'll buy it anyway no matter how crap it is or how much they're getting ripped off for...

(Often wondered if Mickysoft users actually know there's other things out there not made or owned by Billy Boy Grates... Hmm... doubt it...

[Hattig]

The WP7 platform is a couple of years behind, and it shows badly in 2011, whereas Android could get away with it in 2009.

Which is why Microsoft have 'bought on the cheap' Nokia to act as a surrogate parent to it until Microsoft has enough and discards the corpse in a couple of years.

The phone market is all Apple (iOS), HTC, Samsung (Android), BlackBerry (BBOS, QNX future) now. HP will probably resurrect WebOS successfully too. It's all down to the software ecosystem, and it's not there for WP7 yet.

[motrucker]

I always thought that's always been the policy at Billy Boys Neverland, cover your ass at all costs and bugger what the sheep who buy their stuff think (or rather don't think) cos their so dumb they'll buy it anyway no matter how crap it is or how much they're getting ripped off for...

(Often wondered if Mickysoft users actually know there's other things out there not made or owned by Billy Boy Grates... Hmm... doubt it...

Hey, I use Windows damn near every day! My Windows Vista machine sits right next to my Amiga. I'm not saying Windows is the best OS there is (by any stretch!), but it isn't all that bad. There is loads of excellent software written for Windows, including loads of excellent games!
When it comes to "phones" I don't see anything all that great about most of what's available, no matter who makes it.

[Franko]

Hey, I use Windows damn near every day! My Windows Vista machine sits right next to my Amiga. I'm not saying Windows is the best OS there is (by any stretch!), but it isn't all that bad. There is loads of excellent software written for Windows, including loads of excellent games!
When it comes to "phones" I don't see anything all that great about most of what's available, no matter who makes it.

Wow... and I thought you were intelligent, you can never tell about folks you chat to on the web eh...

[Tension]

My best guess is M$ no longer cares about Win Phone

Erm...  you're clearly out of the loop.

[persia]

They cared enough to pay Nokia US$1 billion (AU$978 million/£621 million/€705 million) to use it on all their phones).

Erm...  you're clearly out of the loop.

[commodorejohn]

Hey, I use Windows damn near every day! My Windows Vista machine sits right next to my Amiga. I'm not saying Windows is the best OS there is (by any stretch!), but it isn't all that bad. There is loads of excellent software written for Windows, including loads of excellent games!
When it comes to "phones" I don't see anything all that great about most of what's available, no matter who makes it.

Okay, I'm actually not ill-disposed towards Windows, but...Vista? 7 or XP I could see (I'm an XP diehard, myself,) but Vista? ME's at least kind of adorable in its awfulness...

In any case, while I may like some of their products (XP and...well, pretty much just XP,) I have not been impressed by Microsoft's behavior in recent years. It seems like they've lost any semblance of restraint that they once had, don't understand that people use an operating system to run programs, not to be the Program (and here Tron thought it was being satirical with the MCP absorbing all functions, those many years ago,) and seem to have decided that they can imitate Apple's unabashedly marketing-driven success by hiring marketers whose brainstorming sessions consist of huffing paint thinner and seeing how badly they can make ad-characters' behavior fall into the Uncanny Valley (remember those frighteningly robotic sitcom people from the Windows 7 ad?) Can't say I'm surprised to find out that the company is as moribund internally as it appears to be from the outside...

[gazgod]

Having owned and lived with one of the previous generation of windows phones, I'd never have another one.

It used to ring and lock up at the same time so you couldn't answer it, you had to reboot the phone and ring people back!

Was defiantly the worst phone I ever had, second is the Nokia Symbian 5800 I currently have but at least it works ok as a phone!

Gaz

[runequester]

I havent tried 7, and people tell me its completely different, but I'll concur that the previous windows mobile was absolutely dreadful. Both in reliability and in lacking basic functionality.

Microsoft is basically the opposite of Google. They have a good understanding of the corporate market, but don't really get the consumer market. The xbox was the exception here, and its still behind the wii, though its a solid contender.

Google on the flipside don't really get the enterprise level but they know what regular blokes want.

[Khephren]

2000 was ok, XP was just 2000 with a Cbeebies interface, windows7 is ok too, but should have been a free vista upgrade. Ther resource creep (ok..flood) is ridiculous though. Vista needs 2GB and DX9 card to get up in the morning, hammers the HDD constantly and still won't multitask as well as the old creaky A1200.

[Darrin]

Having owned and lived with one of the previous generation of windows phones, I'd never have another one.

It used to ring and lock up at the same time so you couldn't answer it, you had to reboot the phone and ring people back!

Was defiantly the worst phone I ever had, second is the Nokia Symbian 5800 I currently have but at least it works ok as a phone!

Gaz

I have issues with mine refusing to "end call" until I switch the f*er off (seems to be a roaming issue), calls disconnect because the "end call" button is right where my ear-lobe rests against the screen, it is slow to recognise when it come back within network range and whenever I try and call a number using my thumb on the button it likes to launch BLING instead.

Apart from that, it is great.  

[Darrin]

oh, and occasionally it likes to play the call out of the rear speaker and refuses to switch to "proper" mode making me conduct the call with the phone back-to-front and upside down.

[commodorejohn]

Ther resource creep (ok..flood) is ridiculous though. Vista needs 2GB and DX9 card to get up in the morning, hammers the HDD constantly and still won't multitask as well as the old creaky A1200.

This. That's a large part of the reason I'm planning on switching to Linux when I can no longer get an XP machine - I'm sick of getting newer, nicer hardware only to have the new Windows version take up so much more of the system resources that it only runs marginally better than my previous system :/

[B00tDisk]

I had a windows phone for a few months before I had to give it back to the owner - now I didn't use it for phone services (couldn't afford a contract) but at the time I didn't mind the phone's features, and the ability to do stuff like compose a word doc. etc. on the go were nice.