Paul Thurrott (SuperSite for Windows) is busy writing a book on Windows Phone 7, specifically its deepest, darkest secrets. Actually, it's not so much a dirty exposé as a thorough treatment of the fledgling OS. In doing so, he's spending some time in Redmond, toying with the new OS and gathering data for his book. It's there he was able to sit down and talk with Microsoft partner group program manager Charlie Kindel and senior product manager Greg Sullivan.
When those folks talk, you listen. And truth be told, they actually give some solid answers to plaguing questions like copy and paste, Mozilla and Skype skipping the initial release and even tablets with WP7 (see our resolution/DPI discussion).
We won't spoil all the answers as they're actually quite thorough, so you should read the whole thing. However, in response to all the naysayers and those lodging a lot of complaints, we will leave you with the main gist of Microsoft's position on such criticisms:
We have to have focus. And we made a decision around what we would focus on for this turn of the crank, for the first version. We knew this would create difficulties for certain third parties to build on. It's impossible to build a high performance race car on a mountain bike frame. They're good for certain things only. But we made the decision to focus on things we will do really, really well. For those that we didn't, we feel that we're better off waiting until we can do them really, really well.
Apple took the same approach: nail the basics, don't take shortcuts and build off of a solid core. Sure, when Apple did it, the marketplace was vastly different--they had time to kill. Then again, Android took the exact same approach and it paid off too. Will the market be as forgiving towards Microsoft and Windows Phone 7? We're not sure, but to be honest, we rather like this slow, deliberate approach that they are taking. Lets just hope it pays off.
Read more at SuperSite for Windows.
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