Windows Phone : History of a broken promise

In October 2010, Microsoft announced the global availability of Windows Phone 7, an innovative and radical mobile OS “designed to get you in and out, and back to life.” A lot of promises were made and, as it turned out later, so were a lot of compromises.

Soon after the launch, it became very clear that Windows Phone 7 was a disaster. It lacked basic functionality like copy/paste, device-wide search, multitasking and didn’t support HTML5-based websites, Adobe Flash and Exchange ActiveSync email integration(used by pretty much every single organization in the world and ironically developed and managed by Microsoft) to name but a few. Microsoft received a lot of flak for forcing customers into being beta-testers by releasing a mediocre and incomplete product. As a response to the massive kerfuffle, the folks in Redmond announced Windows Phone 7.5 Mango, promising to iron out all the kinks and take WP to a next level. This marked the beginning of, what I call, “There’s an update for that“ era for WP, or in simple Chinese, Microsoft’s incredible “Screw You” to its customers (more on this later).

 

“There’s an update for that.”

Windows Phone was touted as the end-all-be-all of all Windows Phone issues. Rabid MS fanboys maneuvered the internet and squashed any kind of criticism targeted towards WP with a blunt “Wait for the next Windows Phone update. It’s going to be legendary. Heck, even the original iPhone didn’t have copy/paste or multitasking.” The problem with that statement was that Apple, unlike Microsoft, wasn’t playing catch-up with the rest of the market when it introduced the iPhone. The iPhone was just one of its kind back then. There was nothing comparable.

Fast forward to 2010, the market was saturated with the Androids and iPhones of the world and to compete in such a market you can’t just bank on feature parity. You’ve got to offer something more, something different, something significant. Credit where it’s due, Microsoft did offer something different – a unique UI – but it faltered where it really mattered i.e. nailing the basic phone experience. It also showed how rushed Windows Phone was and how little attention Microsoft was paying to what was going on in the mobile world. At the time of launch, WP lacked features that were considered given for any smartphone in 2010. Strike 1.

In the fall of 2011, Mango was doled out to existing Windows Phone users and the addition of easy-to-use multitasking along with a few differentiators and more freshened and developer friendly Live Tiles were certainly a shot in the arm. A lot of people jumped on the Windows Phone bandwagon following Nokia’s aggressive launch of the Lumia line of handsets and it started to seem very likely that Microsoft will be able to pull it off. And then Windows Phone 8 happened.

One of the reasons cited for the failure of WP to gain traction was it’s lack of support for various hardware profiles. To provide a more consistent experience between devices, WP handsets were required to meet a certain set of hardware prerequisites, chiefly WVGA display resolution and a single-core processor. In the Retina-display, dual-core mobile space of 2012, these specs were deemed last gen and hence WP was blatantly outspec’d by the rest of the market. To tackle such concerns, Microsoft decided to expand its supported hardware profiles to include multi-core and better resolution features in the next WP update, dubbed Apollo. Naturally, this was followed, again, by a rallied cry from MS shills “Wait for Apollo, it’s gonna be legendary.” all over the internet. Little did they know that the ultimate storm was in the making.

“Thanks for your custom. Screw you !”

 

Windows Phone 8

WP7 was developed on top of the Windows CE kernel, which lacked support for multicore processors. The myopic WP development team soon realized that they need to make WP support multicore processors, and to do that they’re going to have to re-write the kernel, which in turn entails that the existing bunch of Windows Phones won’t be compatible with the new software.

For the technologically challenged among us, a kernel is a piece of software that acts as a bridge between the top-level software(i.e. apps and OS) and the underlying hardware. Whenever an app needs the hardware to do something(e.g. taking a picture), it sends a request to the kernel, which in turn, translates that request into something the hardware can understand and gets the job done. To put it in perspective, imagine yourself in a bar with a bilingual, who speaks both Algerian and English, and an Algerian speaker. You’ll have no problem having a conversation with the Algerian guy through the bilingual. Now let’s swap the bilingual with someone who can only speak Mandarin. All hell would break loose, right ? There’ll be no conversation possible whatsoever. That’s exactly what happens when the kernel(the bilingual) is changed. The hardware and the software can’t talk to each other anymore.

Microsoft, committed to its Windows ecosystem motives, decided to chuck away the CE kernel and go with the Windows NT kernel which also makes up Windows 8. The benefits were obvious – multicore support and better app portability and compatibility across Windows 8 and Windows Phone. However, they didn’t see or rather chose not to see a huge, gaping hole in their strategy. The move to NT made WP7 obsolete, within a matter of months. The apps written for WP8 aren’t compatible with WP7. The bunch of features introduced in WP8 aren’t available for WP7. Windows Phone 7 is dead in the water. Microsoft screwed over their most loyal user base and didn’t even think twice about it. Microsoft has no one but themselves to blame for their mobile predicament. First, they went from Windows Mobile to Windows Phone 7 with 0 backward compatibility. Fair play, they needed a new OS. Then, they pulled off the same dick move with WP8, making it incompatible with WP7. Not cool. Not cool when your flagship phone (Lumia 900) becomes a legacy device within 6 months of its arrival. Strike 2.

This is what happens when you don’t start the development of an OS by building a solid, scalable and powerful foundation. Sooner or later, you hit a wall with development, as you can’t hold back new features, that need a powerful base, forever. Windows Phone with all the Live Tiles and shiny, colorful Lumias brought a refreshing feeling to the market, unlike the iPhones and Samsungs with their black bezels. But Microsoft keeps dropping the ball over and over again. I just wish they had gotten their guts together in time and prevented the Apollo snafu. But hey, maybe there’ll be an update for that …..