News

Blog Bytes: Windows Phone 7 Phones It In

• By Gladys Rama
• February 25, 2011

Windows Phone 7 hit a snag this week after its update rendered some Samsung phones unusable (or, in the carefully measured words of RCP's own Lee Pender, "turned some Samsung phones into even more useless hunks of plastic than they already were").

The official Windows Phone Blog was decidedly more chipper. Wrote Michael Stroh:

Has the update process gone perfectly? No -- but few large-scale software updates ever do, and the engineering team here was prepared. Of course, when it's your phone that's having a problem --- or you're the one waiting -- it's still aggravating. That's why we're committed to learning from our first update and improving the process.

Across the Web, however, the reaction has been more sour. From Computerworld's "Seeing Through Windows" blog:

This is only the latest in the comedy of errors that has become Microsoft's mobile strategy. It released a smartphone OS well before Apple or Google, and then let it fester while Apple and Google launched smartphone OSes that now dominate the market. It launched the ill-fated Kin, one of the worst phone ever designed. The launch of Windows Phone 7, designed to finally give Microsoft a fighting chance in the mobile market, was underwhelming at best. And now it can't even manage to issue a minor update correctly -- or fix the problem when it discovers it.

From Today@PCWorld:

One bad update won't ruin Windows Phone 7's chances of success, of course, but it also won't inspire confidence among tech's early adopters, the folks who could spread the word-of-mouth gospel praising Windows Phone 7, and the type of support that Microsoft needs to slow the Android juggernaut.

From eWEEK's strangely prophetic Microsoft Watch:

In the not-so-distant past, when Microsoft was prepping Windows Phone 7 for release, I suggested that the smartphone platform's rollout needed to be near-flawless in order to have the slightest chance of succeeding against Google Android and Apple iPhone. Having bled smartphone market-share for the past several quarters, Microsoft had precious little capital with either consumers or businesses in the mobility realm; one high-profile flub with Windows Phone 7's software or hardware would risk all the effort spent touting it as a viable alternative to those rival platforms.

And here is the in-depth analysis on ArsTechnica's One Microsoft Way blog distilled into one sentence:

This is a monumental cock-up.

Are these legitimate gripes or just examples of breathless Internet hand-wringing? Leave a comment below to tell us what you think.