Windows Phone 8…
Sometimes I wish I could be a fly on the wall to listen in when Microsoft’s mobile folks make their decisions.
I mean, a few years ago they found themselves in a position where, against all odds, their erstwhile omnipotent foe Palm collapsed and left Windows Mobile as the heir apparent. So did Microsoft take advantage of that? Nope. Instead, they failed to improve their mobile OS in any meaningful way, all the while confusing customers by endlessly renaming the thing. And handing leadership over to the phone companies.
Then Apple comes along and shows the world how smartphones are supposed to be. Well, apart from grafting a Zune-like home screen, Microsoft did virtually nothing to advance Windows CE from its mid-1990s roots. Then they come up with Windows Phone 7, which is a whole lot better, but completely incompatible with any earlier Windows CE/Windows Mobile devices and software.
While Phone 7 and the Phone 7.5 update were billed as the future, apparently they weren’t as now there will be Windows Phone 8, which is…. completely incompatible with Phone 7/7.5. And why? Because Phone 8 will supposedly share the same Windows kernel that “real” Windows has (though presumably not the ARM versions). So if Windows 7/7.5 still had Windows CE underpinnings, why were those versions not compatible at all with earlier Windows CE/Windows Mobile versions? It’s just all so confusing.
And about the shared Windows kernel: Wasn’t the very idea of Windows everywhere why Windows failed in so many areas that were not desktop or laptop?
In this industry, one absolutely never knows what’s going to happen. Palm was considered invincible, Transmeta was supposed to succeed, Linux was to be the next big thing, the iPhone and then iPad were widely derided as lacking and a fad when they were first introduced, and Android was certain to quickly challenge iOS in tablets. So perhaps Windows Phone 8 will somehow become a success, but then why baffle the public with Windows 8 for the desktop, Windows RT, which isn’t quite Windows, for ARM tablets, two versions of “Surface” tablets, and then Windows Phone 8 devices that share the Windows kernel but are somehow separate anyway?
Go figure.