Ballmer Admits "We Screwed Up Windows Mobile" 275
Barence writes "Microsoft boss Steve Ballmer has blasted the company's own mobile operating system at the firm's Venture Capital Summit. One tweet from an attendee claims Ballmer said the company had 'screwed up with Windows Mobile. Wishes they had already launched WM7. They completely revamped the team.' Another claims Ballmer said 'we've pumped in some new talent. This will not happen again.' It's not the first time Ballmer has attacked Windows Mobile, having publicly stated that version 6.5 was 'not the full release we wanted.'"
I would be on Slashdot more often... (Score:3, Informative)
If the browser on this HTC was any good for browsing. Seriously logging into a website can take a good 5 full minutes because my STYLUS isn't accurate enough to click the username field - unless I zoom in, which is something that I have yet to master, because its the least intuitive user control ever. If I hold down my click I can select zoom in, and it will remove about 1 pixel from each dimension requiring multiple hold&zoom selections to get it to a point where i can click on what I want. OR, on the odd chance I DO do it correctly, it zooms me in the full 200% possible and I have to literally scroll the screen sideways in order to enter my full username visibly. But since I don't know what it is to do it correctly, I will sometimes zoom in the full 200% on accident, and there seems to be absolutely NO way to Zoom out that I can find.
Don't even get me started on actual BROWSING... sometimes, and by that I mean about 30% of the time, my page will load, and then it will start to Refresh even though its done loading, but it won't actually refresh, it'll just sit at a white blank page with the URL I entered and a progress bar, despite it already having loaded the full page less than a second ago.
Seriously, if I didn't use my email so much, I would say that Internet browsing on this thing is NOT worth the Data package.
Re:Manufacturers (Score:5, Informative)
He didn't say it sucks. He said they wanted to get WM7 done already and they screwed up with *that*. Title is just misleading as hell.
Re:Title (Score:5, Informative)
Unless you're an internal tester, you do not have a Windows Mobile 6.5 phone. Windows Mobile 6.5 isn't even out yet. The first phones with it are slated to ship in late October.
There are people out there with hacked ROMs running leaked builds of 6.5, but you can hardly judge the final OS based on hacked ROMs running leaked builds.
That said, yes, WinMo 6 is totally crappy. Based on my playing around with the leaked builds, WinMo 6.5 is still rather crappy. WinMo 6.5.1 is getting decent, and its UI doesn't look like it was from 2001, but it still has those general WinMo unexplained slowdowns and could use a lot of improvements.
Overall, Windows Mobile is clearly suffering from that Microsoft problem that once they think they are in charge of a market, all innovation completely stops. It's so total of a stop, it really looks intentional, but it's a little hard to believe even Microsoft execs could be so short-sighted as to purposefully derail development. Still, Internet Explorer and Windows Mobile sure look like two examples of that.
Re:I would be on Slashdot more often... (Score:3, Informative)
That's caused by the large amount of Javascript processing /.'s dynamic frontpage does. I disabled the dynamic frontpage and all the other ajaxy features of /. and now it's quite usable on my iPhone 3G. On my commute I occasionally even find myself reading comments and moderating.
Re:Then he... (Score:1, Informative)
context for parent: http://www.techflash.com/seattle/2009/09/ballmer_spots_microsoft_employee_with_iphone_at_company_meeting.html [techflash.com]
Re:Title (Score:4, Informative)
Hmm... its interesting, because you start off saying that OEMs that took th etime to customize have decent products, but then you blame Windows mobile for the problem you're having with your particular phone. Did you consider perhaps that HP dropped the ball and they screwed up your phone?
The WM version that's on my particular iPaq model is more or less untouched by HP, they just added a few themes and gave up. I'd say it's more like Microsoft screwed up Windows Mobile (BTW, I just checked and I have 6.1, not 6.5) and the OEMs that took the time to fix all of Microsoft's mistakes are to be commended. I can't say that HP dropped the ball, but it is quite obvious they didn't pick it up either.
Re:Title (Score:2, Informative)
Ballmer laughed off the iPhone when it came out. An appstore and a billion plus downloads later and who is laughing?
Microsoft can't even launch an mp3 player that is good, they haven't even bothered launching it in the UK and much of Europe.
I think Balmer hit the nail on the head in his latest interview with Engadget, devices like the iPhone (by itself) are a niche market. The smartphone market as a whole is a big market. Microsoft is shooting for the long haul big market with their efforts. One reason he says you'll never see a Microsoft branded phone. iPhone = Niche, just like all Apple prodcuts. Oh, and how many of those 1 billion downloads were free apps? Hmmmmmmmm? Oh and BTW, Microsoft's big competition (and Apple's) in Europe is Symbian, no secret there.
Re:Of course they screwed up Windows Mobile (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Is that true? (Score:3, Informative)
Multitasking is a strength relative to the competition? What competition are you comparing it to?
The iphone, android, the pre and the n900 are all unix based, a system which was multitasking many years before any version of windows could.
I would say windows mobile' underpinnings are actually very weak compared to other systems, it has a proprietary kernel thats not compatible with anything else and seems to suffer from major stability problems compared to the competition. Also, is it even a proper multiuser system? Even if you just have one user, you still want system processes/files to have a higher level of privilege so you can't screw with them.
Comment removed (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Title (Score:5, Informative)
Make that the rest of the world, not just Europe. Nokia and Sony-Eriksson are the big players in EMEA, with the Korean vendors like Samsung and LG doing brisk business in SE-Asia. Windows Mobile is struggling everywhere but in the U.S. Heck, even their flagship OEM (HTC) is now shipping Android phones.
Mart
Re:Title (Score:5, Informative)
My wife had a Palm Treo with Windows Mobile. It was the worst, most pathetic attempt at an OS I've ever seen.
It locked up constantly, got to where you could not actually make calls, ran out of memory, etc. Settings scattered through like 17 different sub-panels, combined with a ton of completely useless settings. Doing anything required far too many clicks. Bluetooth? Forget about reliability. It would just refused to connect to the headset after a while until one power cycled it. Email was painfully slow, particularly when you had attachments or images. And the need to manually delete stuff when it ran out of memory was just crazy. And audio would sometimes just stop working. No ringing, no voice, nothing.
But my favorite was how it handled text messages. Every now and then, she'd need to delete a bunch of them because it ran out of memory (a user should never have to worry about this, IMHO.) Deleting all of the messages took at least half an hour. No exaggeration. I've never seen anything that lame. It's like they were deleting the first, moving all the others down in memory, rewriting them to flash, then repeating.
Even trying to turn the thing of was nearly impossible to figure out. To reboot, it was faster to just pop out battery.
She returned one and got another, no better. She then got an iPhone and loves it.
Re:What did they screw up? (Score:3, Informative)
I don't understand what Ballmer means. What did they screw up?
It's screwed up by being byzantine and awkward. It may be that they're trying to be too one-size-fits-all with Windows Mobile, but the real problem is that it's completely incoherent. I've struggled with four WM phones over the last several years, starting with WM5. I stoically put up with it until recently, when a freind of mine showed me his Developer Preview model Google G2. The Google Android OS is everything WM should be, but isn't. Perhaps WM is a bit hobbled by the necessity of backwards compatibility, but that doesn't explain it entirely. I think there's too many people working on it. Like the old saying goes, "put three teams to work on a compiler and you'll get a three-pass compiler". Break the OS tasking into a bunch of modules, each with a different team, and you get a bunch of modules elbowing each other trying to do stuff.
Re:The thing about WinMobile is (Score:3, Informative)
It requires a lot of effort from the developer to get things started.
It does?
1. Buy Visual Studio 2008 Professional.
2. Start it.
3. Go to File -> New Project -> (C++ |C# | Visual Basic) -> Smart Device -> Smart Device Project
4. Write code.
5. Press F5 to build it and run with attached debugger. It will ask you if you want to run in emulator, or on a real device that's attached to your PC, and take care of the rest.
Gee, that was hard!