Windows Phone 7: Don't bother with this disaster
By Galen Gruman
[I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but, this guy's first impression is not a good one.]
There's no kind way to say it: Windows Phone 7 will be a failure. Announced to much bravado in February as the platform that would breathe life into Microsoft's mobile ambitions, Windows Phone 7 looked based on very early previews as if it might bring something new and exciting to the table. Back then, I noted that I was impressed by what I saw -- with the caveat "so far."
No caveats now: Windows Phone 7 is a waste of time and money. It's a platform that no carrier, device maker, developer, or user should bother with. Microsoft should kill it before it ships and admit that it's out of the mobile game for good. It is supposed to ship around Christmas 2010, but anyone who gets one will prefer a lump of coal. I really mean that.
The early demos were intriguing due to the use of the card metaphor to organize apps and information, providing a possible fluidity among apps and information that would let users swim through their business and social activities. And the distinct UI -- though based on the unsuccessful Zune media player -- looked as if it would stand out from the crowd of mobile devices that have largely copied the iPhone UI, such as Google's Android , RIM's touch-oriented BlackBerry Storm, and Palm's WebOS.
But that was just the lipstick. Now, in Microsoft's in-depth demo this week at the Mobile Beat conference, there's no mistaking the big pig behind the gloss. Seeing the UI in action across several tasks, not just in a highly controlled presentation, shows how awkward and unsophisticated it is -- I had the same feeling you get when you got a movie based on a great trailer, only to discover that all the good stuff was in the trailer and the rest of the movie was a mess. A pig, in fact.
And it's not just the UI: Under the hood, Windows Phone 7 rests on creakingly old technology that the main competitors have all moved past.
I was appalled, flummoxed, and stupefied by what I saw and the answers to the questions from the 15 or so developers in the audience. Also, it should be noted that minuscule attendance and the utter lack of passion in the room spoke volumes about Windows Phone 7's ultimate fate as well. By comparison, about five times as many people attended a session on WebOS.
The bottom line is this: Windows Phone 7 is a pale imitation of the 2007-era iPhone [11]. It's as if Microsoft decided in summer 2007 to copy the iPhone and has shut its developers in a bunker ever since, so they don't realize that several years have passed, that the iPhone has advanced, and that competitors such as Google Android and Palm WebOS have also pushed the needle forward. Microsoft is stuck in 2007, with a smartphone OS whose feature checklist might match that era's iPhone but whose fit and finish would look like a Pinto next to a Maserati.
An awkward UI that recalls Microsoft's history of clunky design
Let's start with that Zune-based UI, called Metro, as that is the first thing users will see.
Now that I've seen it more in action, all I can say is how clunky it is. You will scroll and scroll to find what you want, thanks to how Microsoft has oversimplified all tasks. Each tile has just a little bit of information -- often just three items -- and you're supposed to scroll sideways via finger gestures to see details on each option in full, then click the one you want to get more details. But if you have more than a few apps in a tile, for example, this approach quickly gets too ungainly, hiding most options and requiring navigation down (and up) several layers of interface. It will be the gesture version of spinning your wheels.
The developers at Mobile Beat quickly recognized the labor-intensity of this UI method and one asked the Microsoft rep if anyone had bothered to test it with users. The answer was essentially "no" -- a scary thought indeed.
Also, the big tiles quickly eat up screen real estate (about four fit), so you don't get the compact access to apps that all the other major mobile operating systems provide. I bet this will depress app sales for those poor souls unlucky enough to get seduced by the Microsoft brand or the inevitable discounts at the cellular stores as the carriers try to dump these devices in January 2011 for $25 (shades of the unlamented Kin).
Plus, Microsoft has done its usual trick of gumming up the UI, even though this one is relatively simple. There are two ways to navigate through tiles: in panorama mode and in pivot mode. In both cases, the tile continues to the right, and you swipe to see more. In panorama mode, cut-off text on the right indicates there's more (at Mobile Beat, a developer asked if users knew what that cut-off text was for, and the Microsoft rep essentially admitted they didn't get it was a way to say "more"). In pivot mode, each tile is self-contained, and there is an icon to indicate there is more. It's a subtle difference: Using a panorama basically means the tile continues because it won't fit on screen, while using a pivot means you have a series of what are essentially pages. I bet developers and users will get confused very fast.
Visions of Vista's litter of control panel dialog boxes, Microsoft Bob, the Office ribbon, Clippy, and Windows 3 flew through my head -- not that Windows Phone 7 looks like any of these; it just shares the same flaw of being obtuse.
Once you get past the basic UI, the various apps that Microsoft is showing are not at all encouraging. They have little style and feel very basic. Microsoft has just released a beta SDK for its mobile Silverlight tools, so developers can only now start investigating Windows Phone 7's capabilities. (As InfoWorld's Paul Krill has reported, developers seem tepid about the SDK, too.) Although that might explain the lack of compelling examples from third parties, it doesn't explain the DOS-ness of the Microsoft mail client, which reminded me so much of my green-screen days on VAX. The maps app also had a strong clunkiness to it, both visually (the overly thick borders on things) and operationally (panning and zooming caused a lot of awkward screen redraws).
If the Windows Phone 7's flaws were confined to a poor UI, that wouldn't be a deal-killer for many users. After all, most people run Windows, whose UI has rarely gained acclaim but is generally serviceable once you get the hang of it.
Inexcusably old technology limits Windows Phone 7
But under the hood, Windows Phone 7 gets worse. The core problem is its backward set of technologies, which will fundamentally limit IT, developers, and users alike. Here are some of the more egregious examples of Windows Phone 7's time warp:
* Its browser is Internet Explorer 7, with some IE8 capabilities added -- that means it does not support HTML5, as the iPhone, Android, WebOS, and Nokia Symbian all do. Didn't anyone on the Windows Phone 7 team know about IE9 and its embrace of HTML5? Why isn't Windows Phone 7 using IE9?
* It does not support multitasking except for Microsoft's own first-party apps, meaning the browser, email client, SMS client, and other such preinstalled applications. When you switch applications, they shut down -- just like the iPhone did until iOS 4 was released this spring. Android and WebOS, of course, supported multitasking more than a year ago, and Google and Palm mercilessly attacked Apple for not supporting it as well. Yet Microsoft didn't build multitasking into Windows Phone 7 at the outset?
* This lack of multitasking also means there's no such concept as interapplication communication for third-party apps, not even for a primitive work-around such as the iPhone OS 3.2's "Open In" feature. Thus, apps can't work together à la in WebOS -- even though the UI that Microsoft has shown off seemed designed to do just that. The only thing that Windows Phone 7 will do is let third-party apps call first-party apps, so clicking a URL in a text message will launch the first-party IE browser to show the URL. Of course, doing so closes the app that had the text link in it. (First-party apps can call other first-party apps, and these would all continue to run in parallel.)
* It doesn't support copy and paste. Here again Apple was a much-criticized laggard, supporting the capability only in summer 2009. Microsoft says it didn't have time to get this feature in for the first release (!) but will have it in a future version. Too bad there's not likely to be a future for it. And how could Microsoft not have copy and paste working in Windows Phone 7? After all, it had copy and paste in Windows Mobile 6.1.
No chance of a come-from-behind victory this time
Microsoft has not only just made an imperfect copy of an old iPhone, it has not kept up with the current mobile OS crop nor moved ahead of any of them. I can't tell you how much Windows Phone 7 feels like the early 1990s' Windows 3.1, a clunky attempt to copy that era's Apple System 7. In the case of Windows versus Mac, Microsoft kept plugging away and ultimately shipped Windows 95, which drew close enough to Apple's Mac OS to end the competition. The same thing happened with the Internet and the battle between Internet Explorer and Netscape, which the company first ignored and then made a successful mad scramble on.
Microsoft has a long history of producing bad software and plugging away on it for a few versions -- usually version 3 -- until it is serviceable. But that "get it right in version 3" strategy won't work this time. Back in the Windows-Mac battle, Microsoft had the bigger market share and was already entrenched, thanks to DOS, in the key business market (PCs weren't all that personal yet). Macs were a niche product from their very beginning. Microsoft has the same establishment advantage in the early browser wars. But today, Apple's iPhone is the top smartphone when it comes to data usage such as via the Web and apps, and Google's Android is close on its heels. The iPhone is well-established and entrenched, and Android is fast becoming so. Microsoft is nowhere, having essentially pulled out of the mobile market last year after spending a decade being stagnant during an era of "cold peace" against the equally stagnant BlackBerry OS.
Microsoft has no establishment advantage in mobile today, so delivering an outdated, hamstrung mobile OS and hoping to fix it later just won't fly.
I'm still shocked that Microsoft isn't showing any smarts or competitiveness behind its mobile OS. When the iPhone first came out, a wait-and-see attitude made sense. But more than three years later, it's crystal-clear that the iPhone is no fluke and that it has in fact redefined the mobile market. During this sea change, what has Microsoft done? It wasted a couple years screwing around with Windows Mobile 6.5. When everyone ignored that faux effort, Microsoft made a lot of noise around Windows Phone 7 yet also diverted resources to an array of mobile OSes -- seemingly as insurance policies against Windows Phone 7's failure. Windows Phone 7 should have been Microsoft's "man on the moon" project, but now it's clear that the Windows Phone 7 was Redmond's equivalent of the bungled Hurricane Katrina response effort.
If the iPhone is the platinum standard, Android is the gold standard, WebOS is the bronze standard, and Symbian and BlackBerry tie for tin. Windows Phone 7 is clay -- a clay pigeon, in fact.
Shades of the Vista debacle, it appears that Microsoft is content to deliver an obviously backward operating system for mobile users -- or is so out of touch that it can't see the junk it's built, a larger problem that InfoWorld's editor in chief calls "Microsoft's embarrassing problem with the future."
Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer has made some angry noises at recent events about the need to get mobile right with Windows Phone 7. I guess either that he's not actually seen Windows Phone 7 or that there's no bite behind the bark.
Microsoft needs to kill Windows Phone 7 and avoid further embarrassing itself by shipping this throwback. It's not a question of whether Windows Phone 7 will fail -- it will -- but how long it will take Microsoft to admit the failure. For the company's sake, the earlier it fesses up, the better.
infoworld.com |
