Charlie Kindel On Why Windows Phone Still Hasn't Taken Off 397
An anonymous reader writes "Microsoft's weak share in the mobile phone market can be attributed to its mishandling of industry politics, not inferior technology or features, according to ex-Windows Phone evangelist Charlie Kindel. Microsoft's traditional strategy of going over the heads of hardware vendors to meet the needs of consumers and application developers does not work in the phone market, says Kindel, where the handset makers and carriers have the biggest say in determining the winners (Apple is an exception). Not everybody agrees with Kindel's analysis. Old-timers may remember Kindel, who recently resigned from Microsoft, from his days as developer relations guru for COM/OLE/Active-X."
Well.. (Score:5, Informative)
Well, let's see here...
* The delivery is about three-four years too late
* World+dog who has used Windows-based phones in the past have experience with WMP 6.5 (*shudder*)
* App developers are looking at 'safe' (marketshare-wise) platforms to write apps for. iOS and Android are among them, while WP7 is not.
* The UI tiles may be pretty, but that whole right-hand side of the screen is sitting there unused, making the whole thing look narrower, and therefore smaller
* The ads aren't quite cutting it, and tend to be (IMHO) full of snafus. For instance, the latest sends the subtle message that only whipped boyfriends willing to wear yoga tights will use a Windows Phone.
There's lots more, but those stand out immediately...
Re:And the other reason is... (Score:5, Informative)
You do know that android phones have their own gps in the units, google maps has offline pre-caching mode, and there are other offline maps http://www.mapdroyd.com/ that can be used. I have used google maps while navigating a lake where there was no cell signal, and it worked just fine.
Windows Phone 7 need to be more open.. (Score:5, Informative)
I tested a windows phone 7 device for my company..
We don't allow storage of corporate data on 3rd party servers so right off the bat it's web based storage system was useless..
The OS offers no USB storage options and no removable SD cards.
It had no way to upload videos from the phone other then tethering it to PC and using the MS Zune app to download the off the phone.
Overall we found the OS to be to restrictive for our needs and standardized on Android based phones.
Re:And the other reason is... (Score:5, Informative)
What?
Let's start with the article. The article's focus is completely off - there's nothing windows can do to simply be relevant, and focusing on "how can we get marketshare" shows a complete and utter misunderstanding of the entire market and asking the wrong question. The first question should be "how can we make a great phone with a great experience". Not "why aren't people buying this"? That by itself has already been answered, which is significant market data research given in the form of a failure in the market. Had they not been moronic they'd have gone back the drawing board and come up with better competition by now. This shows that they don't want to look at their own market data and are still in the "la la la our products are great" stage of denial, aka "we're trying to do the apple reality distortion technique".
For your comments: Windows mobile is a subpar OS. Android is an infinitely moddable user interface but stock tends to be completely and utterly crap.
Also, Gmail (and any email program) will cache the last 20 or 50 emails so that you can open them and read them without any data connection whatsoever. By the time you've received notice of the emails they've already been preserved. You can create a draft with no connection, and it will pull the contacts from your contact list.
The GPS works without any form of data, you can cache any area manually yourself or use an app that already has map info. This isn't any different than any other navigation device, whether a GPS device or a cellphone. Also, you have 3 forms of GPS (AGPS [wikipedia.org], S-GPS [wikipedia.org] and location triangulation [wikipedia.org] explicitly by mobile) as so it's practically impossible to not have a signal - even in the middle of a forest. you might not have a map, sure, but you will have gps and a compass.
However, every phone's hardware is different, notably. If you had the samsung vibrant for example, you basically have a not completely accurate GPS. So every phone will be different in how well it works.
Re:And the other reason is... (Score:0, Informative)
The windows phone ui is the only smartphone^h phone ui I've used that hasn't made me want to hurl the entire piece of crap into a wall.
I'm pretty sure that sort of thing is all down to user preference.
Re:What is the implication here? (Score:2, Informative)
Is the submitter trying to imply that his judgement doesn't matter because COM/OLE/ActiveX was somehow bad?
I wouldn't have submitted the article if I didn't think his opinion mattered.
can you imagine the hell that is "developer relations for COM/OLE/Active-X"?
Heh. For the first 2-3 years about the only thing we ISV's had was the incomprehensible "Inside OLE" book from MS Press, and the reference pages on the various interfaces and methods. Charlie helped by answering our emails, he seemed to be the guy in Redmond who knew the most about it. Then IIRC Charlie was the lead author of a long MSDN paper describing the COM architecture which revealed a kernel of elegance under the morass of details. I think COM itself was a pretty decent component technology for its time (apparently it's still being used by Microsoft, even in Windows 8). Unfortunately, Visual Basic was written in such a way that it couldn't take advantage of it without a lot of nasty hacks (dual interfaces, safe arrays and such). And the OLE/Active-X stuff layered on top (the GUI desktop and browser integration pieces) were hairy, confusing, and buggy - it seemed like a mass of interfaces that evolved by committee instead of through design.
- AC submitter
Re:Who is the audience? (Score:4, Informative)
My wife had an old Windows Mobile phone and hated it. She had to replace it once, and it required a lot of tech support from Verizon. The Verizon rep said they hated Windows phones because they have such a high return rate (as did Palm OS phones) and required a lot of support. Granted this was a few years ago, but I suspect Verizon has been burned by Microsoft for too long and want to let other carriers test the waters more fully.
When it takes until version 7 to get a usable phone, you've likely burned a few bridges.
Re:And the other reason is... (Score:3, Informative)
Ah, another anti-fanboy. Your complaints are false and intellectually lazy - see the iPod, which was the first MP3 player to combine a micro-hard drive with a fast interface, just for starters.
MP3 players with 2.5" hard drives had been in the market from Compaq, Creative and others for several years when Apple introduced the iPod. Yes, Apple got the first batch of 1.8" drives from Toshiba, but if they hadn't the others would have. It was obvious that this was an application for the smaller drives. So this is a fairly obvious evolution of MP3 players that would have happend regardless of Apple at the same time as Apple introduced it.
The user interface is a better argument. That was much better on the iPod than on any competing music players at the time.
Re:And the other reason is... (Score:3, Informative)
No, you see, you got that wrong. The only features apple introduced in the last year are picking up where Android left. Voice controls (siri), social network sharing (and only for 1), the notification bar with "limited widgets", simple things like copy past or multi-tasking.
Apple set the bar 3 or 4 years ago. Then almost 2 years ago Android got to where iOS was and now it's surpassing it on almost every aspect (comparing top of the line phones, obviously). Sure, the overall user experience of iOS is great, but saying that Android is catching up to iOS is ridiculous.
And please tell me those "features" no one else has that iOS does.
Re:And the other reason is... (Score:5, Informative)
Actually, when the iPhone launched, it had no app-store, or third party apps at all. Both Blackberry and Windows Mobile of the time did have third party apps. It was severely limited in functionality: It didn't do turn by turn directions (My 2003 dumbphone did that), it didn't do MMS (ditto), it was 2G when all it's competitors were 3G already, It had no keyboard, the virtual keyboard was portrait only, no video recording, no stereo bluetooth, a headphone jack that pretty much only worked with it's own headphones, and pretty bad call quality.
Note these are all features it's competitors of the day already had.
What it _did_ have was a stellar music and videos interface, beautiful industrial design combined with excellent software integration, and a multi-touch capacitive screen. Apparently that was enough.
Re:And the other reason is... (Score:5, Informative)
It's iOS-style "multitasking" for the most part (as distinguished from desktop/WinMo/Android-style). You can technically abuse the background task APIs to get almost true multitasking (or, with sufficient permissions, modify the app-backgrounding suspend/dehydration behavior to get full multitasking), but that's really only useful for homebrew - Microsoft won't accept an app that does such things into the Marketplace.
Marking a text box read-only should prevent the keyboard from showing up but still allow the user to select and copy text.
The screen designer built into Visual Studio is a bit of pain. The one in Expression Blend (which is explicitly designed for XAML, and a version of it specifically for WP7 XAML is included with the dev kit) is much better, though it is a new UI to learn. As for resolutions, WP7 only allows a single resolution - 800x480 - so the concerns you have coming from Android aren't currently relevant. If/when they allow other resolutions, my guess is that legacy apps will just use the hardware scaler (which is required on WP7 devices) to enlarge the screen contents to the new resolution, while new apps will ahve the option of targeting 1200x720 or whatever new resolution they decide to allow.
Visual Studio has a debug-output view, scrollable with history (I don't know if it can be redirected into a file, never tried). It's quite possible to print debug messages from within an app; they will only show up when the debugger is attached (of course) and appear in a VS window/tab. It's also possible to use MessageBox to show debug messages during development, though that's a hacky solution (it works without the phone being connected to the debugger, though). As for OS-level logging, it's not visible. That shouldn't be a problem when developing sandboxed apps, though.