Ballmer Admits "We Screwed Up Windows Mobile" 275
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by
kdawson
from the chairs-have-been-thrown dept.
from the chairs-have-been-thrown dept.
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.'"
Journalism (Score:5, Interesting)
Manufacturers (Score:3, Interesting)
Of course they screwed up Windows Mobile (Score:5, Interesting)
The iPhone is doing gangbuster sales with a chopped version of OS X. Windows Mobile has been around much, much longer yet it was blown out of the water.
The latest Zune doesn't run Windows Mobile since Windows Mobile is crap. The latest Zune doesn't have an app store because Windows Mobile is making an app store and they don't know how it's going to turn out!
Seriously, Apple caught them asleep at the wheel.
So he knows there is a problem ... (Score:5, Interesting)
1) Microsoft wants to sell it when their competitor O/Ss are free.
2) Window's Mobile has earned itself a bad reputation both in terms of ease of use and reliability. There were 7 WM users in my work unit a 18 months ago. Today there are zero. Five went to iPhone, 1 to Pre and one to RIM. The Pre guy has iPhone envy because using the keyboard is not what he hoped and because the Pre software being 18 months younger than iPhone's is also noticeably slower despite similar hardware. (He'll probably get over it when the upgrades arrive.) Of these 7, 5 of them were Microsoft fanboi's but even they were fed up with the bugs and the clumsy interface.
(None of these guys develop for these devices so they don't' care about any of those issues.)
So what makes him think Microsoft has time to recover from this especially if they expect to continue to charge for the O/S? What is the value proposition for the device manufacturers especially 9 months to a year from now when the free O/Ss and their tools will have had even more time to evolve and mature?
Re:Title (Score:5, Interesting)
They didn't screw up whole Windows Mobile like you could think
I have a Windows Mobile 6.5 phone and... Well, yes they did. Totally. I have heard that the vendors that took the time, cost and effort to customize WM6.5 have produced fairly usable products. The HP iPaq 914c Business, not so much. Not at all, frankly. But I will give them this; they have ported the unique Windows experience to the small screen - I have to reboot the phone about once a week to prevent it from locking up when answering or placing calls. This functionality was obviously a low priority. I have to go into the task manager daily to remove programs, or else they fill up the memory, even preventing the task manager from running, another condition forcing a reboot.
Executive summary/mini-review of the HP iPaq 914c: Nice hardware, lousy camera, shitty OS.
The thing about WinMobile is (Score:4, Interesting)
It's really easy to write apps for. You use all the same tools, APIs, and libraries you use for regular Windows development. Many times porting from desktop to mobile is a matter of redoing the UI and recompiling. All the backend stuff stays the same.
It was easier to write software fro WM 5 years ago than it is to write for iPhone today. There should be thousands of apps out there. But there aren't. Because WM after version 3 began to suck more and more.
Re:I would be on Slashdot more often... (Score:3, Interesting)
Default Opera browser on my HTC Diamond, which is actually already a generation out of date, is pretty good. In fact, I'd say it's the best-designed mobile browser I've ever used, better even than the vaunted iPhone Safari.
It initially loads a whole page with absolutely tiny fonts so you can get an overview. Scroll wheel zooms in or out so you can get detail where you need it. Double tap does a quick zoom in with reflow, so that on pages with long lines of text you can read it all in one column. This dual mechanism is ingenious, giving you the best of both worlds of preserving formatting and having a mobile version of real webpages that is usable.
Unfortunately, while I think the design is fantastic, the whole thing is let down by the cruddiness of Windows Mobile and the slow CPUs that always seem to be paired with it. Zooming with the scroll wheel sometimes takes a few seconds to register, which doesn't sound like much, but is enough to make using the scroll wheel irritating, and leaving the browser with basically only the reflow zoom mode, which it really a shame.
Seriously they screwed it up a long time ago (Score:5, Interesting)
Blame Game? (Score:5, Interesting)
Mea culpas like this are a way to soothe customers and not do anything about it.
'New talent' claims are especially suspicious because the problem, typically, is a more global work environment issue brought on by the executive staff who, coincidentally, never change.
Two years from now it will be the same speech. 5 years from now, same speech. Why? culture won't have changed.
Is that true? (Score:5, Interesting)
Is the Windows Mobile situation caused by an inferior platform? I always had the idea that WM was/is failing because mobile manufacturers don't want to go the way of the PC manufacturers and end up like commodity makers with razor-thin margins, leaving all fat profits, control of the complete experience and user-locking to Microsoft. They somehow, for estrange reasons, seem to mistrust Microsoft and won't put its software on its handsets. It's not a technology reason. Am I wrong? Does WM suck when compared to other mobile development platforms?
Re:Title (Score:1, Interesting)
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?
Re:Title (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Re:Here's how you fix that Steve... (Score:4, Interesting)
I think you're joking, but Ballmer's original insight actually holds up pretty well here in the mobile arena. Having played around with the different mobile platforms, the biggest problem with Windows Mobile 6.5.1 is the lack of modern developers.
All of the software on the iPhone is modern, and finger-friendly.
On Windows Mobile, most of the the software applications still look like Palm applications from circa 2001 with tiny drop down menus and radio buttons. It's not impossible to design good applications, but most of the best developers are no longer developing on Windows Mobile. The number of apps may be somewhat similar on the iPhone and WinMo but the quality is leagues apart, even taking into account the 1,000 fart apps on the iPhone.
While maybe not as much so as on a desktop, for a mobile OS, the apps are still a large part of the success of the OS, and Windows Mobile despite its openness to development is basically terrible when it comes to attracting the developers to make them.
Time to buy another company? (Score:2, Interesting)
Personally, I think Microsoft should seriously consider buying a company like SPB Software or another Third Party company to continue the development of Windows Mobile. It's clear that Microsoft dropped the ball years ago and didn't realize the potential of Mobile devices and I am not sure Windows Mobile 7 will leap frog or even compete with the iPhone and/or Blackberry.
Re:WinMo 6 is OK but not finger friendly (Score:3, Interesting)
I've used mainly two WM devices, an old PDA and a recent 6.1 smartphone. The touchscreen OS was clearly designed for the stylus, but I've never had much problems with using my fingers to scroll through a page or dismiss a dialog when absolutely necessary. And when using it with two hands, which is apparently how the various iphones are usually used nowadays, I prefer to use the stylus anyway.
The more recent smartphone version works just fine as a phone though, that is, the regular keypad is enough to comfortably interact with the system.
None of the standard WM versions are of course in any way sexy, but this also means there's no shit flying around the screen all the time when you're doing something trivial. The various custom interfaces like those from HTC, Sony Ericsson, or SPB seem to provide all the bling anyone might ever want.
The various apps are probably my favorite part about WM though. Since nobody's forced into a restrictive store, there are all kinds of apps from kamasutra to packet sniffers, to programming languages. Seeing all the excitement about the recent Wolfenstein 3d port was quite amusing [youtube.com] too. Developing for the system is quite easy and fun well. So far I've only ran into one somewhat ugly issue when accessing the camera directly from a C# app, and that's only a problem because I have about zero experience with C++. All the other APIs I've used were pretty clean and easy to use, and as a result, I've quickly written about half a dozen apps which are actually useful without any previous WM/C# experience.
So what I'm saying is that WM definitely has some serious problems, but I'm willing to overlook them just so that I don't have to put up with anyone's (Apple, Google, and Palm, I'm looking at you) bullshit.
Microsoft and Innovation (Score:4, Interesting)
Okay, strike the word innovation, which actually wasn't what I was looking for anyway and insert improvement.
Regarding your point though, I do strongly disagree, unless you define innovation in terms of only large ground-breaking break-throughs and not small-scale advancement.
Their R&D labs produce a large amount of interesting research.
In terms of the small-scale, Surface is definitely neat, the Office ribbon bar is (regardless of your opinions on its merits, as it does have its fans including myself) as far as I know a wholly new UI approach. They've been advancing the state of tablets and hand-writing recognition continually over the years. Their Bluetrack mice seem to be a solid improvement over the status quo. I could go on, but they've made a huge number of fairly innovative developments, both large and small, over the years.
Microsoft needs to start listening again... (Score:3, Interesting)
And not just in the Windows Mobile arena.
Microsoft did one really smart thing in the Windows Mobile / Pocket PC arena, back in 2000. They invited a bunch of Palm loyalists to Redmond, gave them Pocket PCs, and spent two years doing followups. AND they actually paid attention to the results. I was one of the "Palm Enthusiasts" they picked and I was absolutely amazed how much of our input went into Pocket PC 2002.
Palm responded by inviting us to join the "Palm Influencers" mailing list. Boy was that list mis-named If Palm had actually been listening to their customers for those two years, instead of flushing the company and product line down the drain in an attempt to come up with a Palm OS on steroids that was similar to Windows CE (and failing, twice) they would STILL own the handheld market.
On the other hand, we have Windows Vista and Windows 7 and more and more restrictions on what users can do on their own computers. Does ANYONE go to Microsoft and say "hey, I want you to lock me out of my computer"? No, it's just like Palm's vision of Garnet or Mudstone or whatever they were calling their new OS.
Ballmer: you need to go back and find Beth Goza and Derek Brown, the people who ran that event, and pay them WHATEVER IT TAKES to get them to take over from whoever you have dealing with your Windows customers now. Seriously.
Re:WinMo 6 is OK but not finger friendly (Score:2, Interesting)
I like the platform, but I'm with you on the finger v stylus modes. It was, after all, built for pocketPCs, which everyone expected to have a stylus for. Nowadays, though, fingers are the way to go, and WinMo just hasn't gotten with the program, despite a full revision (6) since anyone has really used a pocketPC. Make the clickable status icons bigger and make it easier to navigate to programs and settings. There are lots of things we're asking winmo phones to do that the OS just wasn't made for, and MS can't seem to get it in gear to fix them. The amazing thing is that the developer community does seem to push out layer upon layer of things that the UI should do natively, and MS never seems to notice. Make you wonder if everyone at MS really doesn't use their software, or if they're just lazy.
Re:Title (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Correction (Score:5, Interesting)
No.
Whatever you think about Microsoft (and if it's the usual cult mentality, I really don't care) Microsoft have screwed up pretty badly (more than normal, if you will) on WM7.
It's hella late and they have pissed off a lot of people. I would personally really like to see Microsoft's continual presence in the mobile space if only for the sake of diversity... I'm unashamedly a Microsoft user and mostly supporter. Downmods be damned. But WM7 is pretty much a disaster area.
I hope they have something really good on the way... And even then, I worry that they're gonna let Android rule the world. Which is careless, because Android used to suck. But it's getting better very quickly, and there's still no sign of WM7.
Re:Asleep at the wheel (Score:3, Interesting)
Excellent point. I would say that the iPod phenomena has been a demonstration of Apple's traditional strengths: integration of software and hardware, industrial design, "simple" interface.
With the App Store, Apple has entered the arena that Microsoft has traditionally dominated: software platform. We already have a few revisions of the iPhone with different processor speed, in several years there will be warnings pasted all over iPhone apps "only compatible with x86 iPhones manufactured 2012 or later". This is where Microsoft thrives, creating a common platform for disparate hardware.
Ripping off Apple has also been a traditional Microsoft strength.
In the end, I don't disagree with you, neither of us can predict the future. Watching Microsoft flail around unsuccessfully is going to be just as enjoyable for me as if they were to build the perfect iPod-killer. Either way, it will be fun to watch :)
Re:Let me guess... (Score:3, Interesting)
And this is exactly the problem. Microsoft marketed Windows Mobile to traditional Windows developers. But a phone is not a desktop. A phone is a resource-constrained device, and traditional desktop programmers are not used to this environment.
Worse, it seems, from my experience, that Microsoft marketed WinMo internally in the same hare-brained way, as the phone has a UI metaphor and a resource consumption totally unsuited for its target platform.
It appears that this is finally getting through to upper management, which is a good thing, as the mobile market is sufficiently competitive that MS can't play its usual game of letting hardware resources catch up with their shoddy programming without getting their lunch eaten by Symbian, Blackberry, Apple and Google.
Mart
Re:Title (Score:4, Interesting)
What do you mean? The ZuneHD is amazing. And with a ZunePass the experience is incomparable.
Re:Title (Score:1, Interesting)
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.
(emphasis added)
What do you mean? The ZuneHD is amazing. And with a ZunePass the experience is incomparable.
It looks like you were not paying attention to what the parent actually said. The Zune HD is not available in outside of the States (and it looks like you cannot even get it in Canada), so I do not see how a product you cannot buy is any good.