symbolset's Journal: Why Windows Phone 7 is doomed

This is a work of fiction - as all my slashdot coments are. It infers facts not in evidence. It describes inferred historical events. Dates are not precise. The bulk of it is however my firmly held opinion given considerable experience and study in the field. It is sourced from a /. comment previously written and I'm replicating and revising it in my journal both so I can find it more easily and so my slashdot friends can see it even though the article must fade from the main page:

Normally I'm not one to praise Microsoft's end results, but I'm not stupid. They hire the brightest minds from the best schools with strong foundations in classical IT art as well as contemporary vision and they work them to death because that hazy zone between exhaustion and physical failure is a special point where human brains integrate at miraculous levels. Microsoft has known this for twenty years and organizes its workers accordingly. These folks driven in this way can make an awesome mobile OS, they did, and I'd love to have a copy of the source for that bad boy. These Microsoft developers made a rock solid performant and genuinely innovative phone OS which is the core of Windows Phone 7. It's tiny, boots fast, suspends and resumes instantly, and pinches ergs like they're made of platinum. It has an intuitive touch-centric interface. It works flawlessly with all the latest technologies - hell, it'd make a great HPC OS if these jerks would think out of the box now and then. This was about two years and three reorgs ago. This is the mockup they'll trot out to the major phone vendors hoping to get them to push the platform - short a few apps but you can see the potential because it's beautiful, intuitive, responsive. They built an app store for it, and shopped the mockup around to app developers under NDA. Some of the AC posters here even have it and they're in awe of its incredible flexibility, its power, its potential - and they should be because this bare OS rocks. They built apps for that were complete a year ago, and they're continuously refining them in the hopes that the platform will launch someday. Microsoft floats an early 2009 release date to some of their preferred pundits even though it's not finished yet because that's how you feed a flackalyst.

It's a killer mobile OS but it's not a Windows yet. For six months they put some finishing touches on the version they intend to ship - integrating Bing search and Windows Live services into everything, building the Mobile Office apps for it, porting Silverlight, .NET for mobile and a bunch of other stuff. This is leveraging the platform so that it pushes all of the other Microsoft platforms because making products that can be extracted from their internicine application and server dependencies is not the One Microsoft Way. The shipping version then ran like a dog, leaked memory like a seive and crashed every few minutes. So eighteen months ago they rebooted the team and tried again. They got the same result, so nine months ago they reorg the group from higher up and try again. The new group can't get the thing to work right in nine months, so yesterday they reorg the entire entertainment and mobile division to be directly under Steve Ballmer and reboot their efforts yet again. This product was supposed to ship in early 2009. It is not even close to ready. It probably never will be because all of these internicine ties never did work well, are a moving target, and have reached an insurmountable level of complexity for a mobile device which must by definition be the ultimate in computer reliability and stability while remaining cutting edge in a dynamic market. It literally can't be done.

Even today Microsoft executives are shopping around that slick bare mockup that no end user is ever going to see to their phone partners at the manufacturers and carriers, playing the push/pull game. "You want this. You need this. You're going to want to start planning the marketing around this product right away. This is going to be a slam dunk! And look - it says Microsoft on it everywhere so you know businesses are going to eat it up. [Hushed]It has IE and Outlook." / "Of course, this iPhone killer isn't for everybody - it's exclusive to our special friends. Committed friends like you who know the value in long term relationships with a powerful member of the digital ecology. Partners who are willing to sacrifice any control whatever of the end-user experience. Existing paid-in Windows Mobile deals don't count because this isn't Windows Mobile - it's Windows Phone. For something this great we need a new level of commitment and we're not offering it to folks who care so little about their customers that they'll push that Android thing on them."

The whole time these Microsoft account execs know the real thing with a real app load bears as much relation to the thing they're showing as you do to a squid. They know the intended shippable version can't run at all on equipment with a BOM less than $1000 and even at that crashes several times an hour. They probably took meetings today pushing this thing, knowing that the latest reorg means there's no hope of a shipping product that works well in the next year. They don't know that in that year the target will shift again, pushing their target date out another year as the team refactors yet again. Even if they knew, they don't care. They're willing to believe the code monkeys can make it work because they make $400K + options, live in nice homes, and are going to milk this cow for all it's worth. If they had scruples they'd never have passed the first interview.

Meanwhile the phone partners, the carriers and the PC partners have wised up. They have to sell product today. They can't wait forever for Microsoft to pull their collective heads out the the dark place they're at and deliver a product to compete with the iPhone and the iPad and the iPod if they want to stay in business and WiMo 6.5 just won't do. Those that bought the "Real Soon Now" story for over a year lost serious opportunity to those more skeptical. In this business the two+ years from intended WP7 release in early 2009 to a current hope of mid 2011 really is forever. In one year Android has gone from "Android what?" to 28% share of sales and the growth arc if continued has total mobile domination by mid 2011. This is actually good news for all of us because once vendors let go of the "wait for WP7" idea they don't have to be Microsoft's special friend any more and can instead focus on giving us what we want right now: Progress. So HP buys Palm, Dell offers Android Phones and slates, all carriers that can't get iPhone like AT&T (who have an iPhone exclusive in the US) push Android like it's the Holy Grail and even AT&T carries Android because they must offer choice and there's only one iPhone.

We have one more Windows Mobile reorganization left to go. This is the one that knocks monkeyboy off his perch at the top of the tree. The guy who replaces him will know better than to let this cursed project live a single day. This train came off the rails years ago, and we're now only still watching the crash in slow motion because these things take time - but the outcome will be as certain that day as it is today and as it was two years ago. It's got fail written all over it.

Hidden in this post is a secret message to Microsoft on how to fix their stuff - as my posts often do. I've been doing that for years. I do that because it amuses me to taunt their employees who post here about their obviously predictable failures by linking to my old posts. I don't want Microsoft to win because they have a long history of being evil, but it amuses me to tell them how to win knowing that they'll ignore me so that I can later point out how they could have won if they weren't such fools. So far this is working and the outcome is to me hilarious. Everybody needs a hobby and this is mine.