Peter Bright on Microsoft’s struggles to ship its first Windows Phone 7 update:
Microsoft, instead, is covering for its partners. It covered for Yahoo when a Yahoo bug caused sky-high data usage. And it’s still covering. Instead of useful information such as “which carriers have blocked the February update,” or “which carriers will block NoDo when it eventually arrives,” we get vague comments about “working closely” with the carriers. Even though we already know that some carriers can actually treat their customers with utter contempt and block updates, Microsoft still skirts around actually admitting it–a fine example of PR standing in the way of actually relating to the public. Joe Belfiore already acknowledged that they could, so there’s really no need to dance around the issue.
Obviously this is information that might be considered “sensitive,” but putting the carriers’ needs over the users’ needs serves only to alienate the users, and it’s Microsoft who looks bad as a result.
As I wrote before, I am a huge fan of Windows Phone 7. It is a breath of fresh air in a mobile field that is littered with row upon row of app icons. Back in November, I was willing to give the benefit of the doubt with how far behind they were in terms of feature parity. Now it is the middle of March and I have yet to see a single update to my Samsung Focus.
Microsoft doesn’t even need to match feature for feature with Android and iOS. What they need to do is fill in the obvious gaps in their platform.
- Native integration with other social networks like Twitter and Flickr. The Facebook integration is fantastic and a great start, but it’s time to expand.
- A mobile web browser that is not based off of the core of Internet Explorer 7.
- Better search in the App Marketplace so that music and videos aren’t also jumbled into the results.
- Support for more than one Google Calendar.
- You get the point.
Rather than making promises to improve the Windows Phone platform, just do it.