“There’s no kind way to say it: Windows Phone 7 will be a failure,” Galen Gruman writes for InfoWorld. “Announced to much bravado in February as the platform that would breathe life into Microsoft’s mobile ambitions, Windows Phone 7 looked based on very early previews as if it might bring something new and exciting to the table. Back then, I noted that I was impressed by what I saw — with the caveat ‘so far.'”
“No caveats now: Windows Phone 7 is a waste of time and money,” Gruman writes. “It’s a platform that no carrier, device maker, developer, or user should bother with.”
“Microsoft should kill it before it ships and admit that it’s out of the mobile game for good. It is supposed to ship around Christmas 2010, but anyone who gets one will prefer a lump of coal,” Gruman writes. “I really mean that.”
“In Microsoft’s in-depth demo this week at the Mobile Beat conference, there’s no mistaking the big pig behind the gloss,” Gruman writes. “Seeing the UI in action across several tasks, not just in a highly controlled presentation, shows how awkward and unsophisticated it is — I had the same feeling you get when you got a movie based on a great trailer, only to discover that all the good stuff was in the trailer and the rest of the movie was a mess. A pig, in fact.”
Gruman writes, “The bottom line is this: Windows Phone 7 is a pale imitation of the 2007-era iPhone. It’s as if Microsoft decided in summer 2007 to copy the iPhone and has shut its developers in a bunker ever since, so they don’t realize that several years have passed, that the iPhone has advanced… Microsoft is stuck in 2007, with a smartphone OS whose feature checklist might match that era’s iPhone but whose fit and finish would look like a Pinto next to a Maserati.”
Oh, there’s more, much more (three pages worth) in the full article – very highly recommended – here.
MacDailyNews Take: Ballmer’s days are numbered. When the ax finally falls, in the spirit of one clueless sales guy buffoon for another, may they promote Kevin Turner to CEO.
[Thanks to MacDailyNews Reader “Dirty Pierre le Punk” for the heads up.]
Microsoft is dying the slow, unaware death of the dinosaur it is. They are going to have to fragment and reinvent themselves to survive. If the keep trying to play this “me too” game with every emerging market, they are doomed.
For MS to survive they must:
Ditch Ballmer
Split into 3 entities: an OS company that makes windows, a game company centered around the xbox, and a software company that writes cross platform tools and apps.
Quit trying to play catch-up and big bully, and instead focus on making world class products, and they can survive.
With technology, three years ago was another era.
What a load of crap article, it’s info world..what do you want,
As an Apple fan and iPhone user, I sometimes just can’t believe the garbage that this site links to.
Sometimes You guys make Gizmodo look like the New York Times.
@Predicting and chew
People so often expect to find a connection between wealth and smarts, but it’s never that simple.
Not only is Bill Gates not smart, he is technologically illiterate. He is notable for being driven, and having been at the right place/right time to exploit an opportunity with the tools his daddy gave him, to whit: how to steal and get away with it, how to craft a mine field of a contract, how to make predatory partnerships while acting like a naive geek, and how to ignore regulations and morality. That’s it.
Paul Thurott is actually one of the most objective journalists out there.
He calls Microsoft to task all the time, he spent more than his share of time criticizing pre Windows phone 7 phones, and adimited to loving his iPhone .
The guys a strait shooter, if he talks possitively about Windows phone 7, he’s not being a fan boy, he’s actually objective about what he reports.
The Apple side of things could use some of the same.
Kenny says it best…
Bingo m159!
Kin 3
VistaPhone?
Maybe Ballmer and Michael Dell should just switch jobs for a few years?
@ Perfect…
Get your head out of your ass already. A few new iPhones are having a problem with the antenna (in weak signal areas) and you believe this is a wide spread problem and that every person who bought one of the 3 million iPhones sold to date is experiencing this issue? Sorry but there are bound to be people trying to use their phones in areas with very weak signals any phone can be affected by the way it’s held.
In my home, where I get a fairly weak signal, I can hold my iPhone 3GS in a specific way and cause the bars to drop. I can do the same with a friend’s cheap Samsung (AT&T) phone as well. This is not a problem with the iPhone 4, but rather a problem with the signal coming from the cell towers.
If this really were a serious wide spread problem, a helluva lot more people would be complaining and returning their phones. And there wouldn’t be a 3 week back order for them either.
You’re a moron, that simply wants to hate on Apple.
I have a feeling Jobs will be doing a few cartwheels of his own when MS releases the newest pos…
To be fair, when they release the windows phone 7, they should do a side by side review with the original 2007 iPhone
After seeing what MS did to the ZuneHD roll out and support. The concept of the dual screen management device called couier getting killed. The Zunehd is not a bad device. And I love mine! But it got kicked out the launch door and then that door slammed right behind it very hard. And was left to flounder.
Would suspect WP7 will be DOA anyway. Why go with WP7 with android out there many generation beyond it? WP7 looks like another Vista. As in OOPS! Need new VISUAL Cool App’s Mobil OS!!! Lets see.. Take the Zune HD interface. Take what we have from its CE and add in last version of 6 phone parts… Yes.. It will work… No it wont…
Look at Kim systems. Sheech! All that money, time effort and killed super fast… Any one would be nuts to deal with MS at this point. A true bag of pain.
MS main problem is sticking to and completion… Its been a major problems for them decades! Except for a few things they have failed big time to plan and stay the course.
MSFT is lost w/o day-to-day leadership of BG, but he’s been loyal to his CEO Harvard friend. MFST meeds to move out of any DOS related OS, adopt new, like APL did when AJobs put aside the original Mac OS to Jons brillent “NEXT” OS, now baisis for OS X. Courage. Confidence. Genius all a part of Jobs. BG has grown to have all.
Lets not get down on Ballmer, secretly he’s on Apples payroll
M$ should have bought WebOS and Palm when they had the chance. At least they would have got a modern OS to play around with.
M$ problems are that they are dealing with an ancient OS that is crippling everything they try and do. They are stuck in the mud and can’t do anything right.
I hope they continue to try to make crap because it lowers their profit margin and their respect in the market.
Joe07
“Paul Thurott is actually one of the most objective journalists out there.”
Dude… I laughed so hard I blew coffee through my nose.
Very good, I assume that was tongue in cheek (satire)
Yes?
<beat>
Hope so…
….otherwise: one of the vapid trolls ever (more-so than even our resident “stealth-mole-troll” thelonious (whose troll was at least brief))
They still have that monopoly. Remember how crappy Windows 3 was yet MS kept gaining huge shares.
Then MS blatenly copied the Mac with Windows 95, gained 98% of the market. Yes it was copying the Mac to catch up. Windows 7 is copying the iPhone of the past Sounds familiar doesn’t it? All MS has to do is provide free tools to ad functionality that only works for their Office/Outlook/Intranet/Web. No one should just dismiss MS with this market. These guys are geniuses in figuring out how to lock products to their cash cow monopoly approved Windows OS.
Softie will buy RIMM. It’s “cheap”. Gives good revenue stream and can go exist becuase of entrenched business use base and lowcost entry level phones.
DogGone, I agree and disagree, yes webos was better than winmo, but isn’t that like cow poop tastes better than dog poop?
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Both are hopelessly flawed (though for different reasons) and neither has much of a chance in a market dominated by iOS & blackberry (and at least in the US android mobile, android can’t get much traction in the world market)
MS is a software ONLY company for christsakes… if they can’t write software, what the hell can they do? The only reason MS should have been considering palm was for the patent portfolio.
Softie will buy RIMM. It’s “cheap”. Gives good revenue stream and can co-exist because of entrenched business user base and low cost entry level phones. $80 share. Before Win 7 roles out.
I keep track of macdaily almost on a daily basis. I own both apple and windows based platforms. I have truly enjoyed my iphone 3g for the last 2 years, money worth spent.
I didn’t believe all those reports of the iphone 4g “attenuation” problem until yesterday I got hold of one.
I was holding it like I hold my 3g to surf and from 2 bars went to searching in about 1 minute. It was insane.
Practicaly I don’t mind cause I always use cases (if I am going to spend 720 euros for a glass phone I will ofcourse use a case) but the truth be told the problem looks real. Doesn’t happen with my 3g nor the 3gs’s plenty of my friends have. Nor any other phone.
I am a doctor and reception in hospitals is usually bad so I am pretty confident that it would be pretty unusable without a case.
I will end up buying it a month or so when it becomes officialy available in my country but I am really unhappy with Apple and they way the company handled the issue. Over the years I had come to expect way more.
I just hope that Apple doesn’t decide to roll out an updated phone in 4 months time (and watch my 720 euros go down the drain). That would make me sell even my old 1st gen nano and never buy anyting with an apple logo.
@ Jubei:
“MS blatenly copied the Mac with Windows 95, gained 98% of the market”
Uh, that’s because Mac competed with DOS which was already on 90% of the computers at that point. Windows 3 and 95 surpassed the Mac OS, because they both could be installed on most of those computers. At that point in time, most computers were sold to the enterprise and the enterprise bought “IBM”. Consumer spending didn’t pick up until computer prices came way down. And the first people who bought them were people who had experience using them at work.
“They still have that monopoly”
They have a monopoly on the desktop, which is completely incompatible with the mobile space. It doesn’t matter which mobile device is used. No one is tied to Windows. This is why Microsoft tries so hard to tie its technologies to Windows, it keeps people on their platform and keeps other platforms down. This doesn’t work in the mobile space where all is fair game.
Apple is the only company right now with a popular platform that runs on multiple devices; Media Player, Smart Phone, and Pad / Slate Computer. Not only can content be shared among these devices, but so can applications… and it’s the applications that count.
@ Joe07
LOLOLOLOLOL!!!!!
But back to the point… One of the software devs on the WinPho7 project recently left the company. This person has written hundreds of software titles, including games you’ve heard of and probably played.
This ex-MS developer moved on to greener pastures partly because of the exact same problems your read about in this article. I know this because they told me the whole story when they were at a party at my house last weekend.
WP7 is dead on arrival. Assuming it actually arrives.