Microsoft's re-reinvention of Windows Mobile risks hurting Windows Phone 7's widespread adoption by large companies. Phones from HTC, Dell, LG, and Samsung won't work out of the gate in October with standard Microsoft technologies used by corporations to deploy and manage their apps. That's because Windows Phone 7 won't work …

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Monday 26th July 2010 21:21 GMT Combat Wombat

Awesome !

If I were working at RIM now, I would be sending Microsoft a thank you note, and some chair deflecting helmets for managers.

What a F'ing stupid idea.

We had an iphone Vs Blackberry debate here, and we firmly told management they could not have their itoy because we did not have the infrastructure to manage and secure it.

MS is aiming squarely at the business crowd, yet they have no fucking idea about their customers basic needs.

I'll be buying stock in RIM methinks..

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1. Tuesday 27th July 2010 09:08 GMT Anonymous Coward
  
  RIM
  
  "If I were working at RIM now, I would be sending Microsoft a thank you note, and some chair deflecting helmets for managers."
  
  ...... If I were working at RIM I'd be much more worried about the (almost inevitable IMO) takeover offer being sent from Seattle.
  
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2. Tuesday 27th July 2010 21:11 GMT jonathanb
  
  Re: Awesome !
  
  Blackberry may pick up some ex Windows Mobile customers, but I think the rest of them will go to Android. Certainly if you look at the larger than phone sized handhelds with barcode scanners and thermal printers running line of business applications; currently they mostly run Windows Mobile. Windows Phone isn't going to be an option for them, nor is Blackberry or iOS, so that leaves Symbian or Andriod, and I think Android is the more likely option.
  
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Monday 26th July 2010 21:21 GMT Oli 1

oh dear...

its really not looking good for winphone7.

They seem to have learnt nothing from the KIN disaster.

I have to suffer with a horrible incarnation of WinMo on 10 handsets in my office and thats bad enough, i feel sorry for anyone running 100's of these handsets. Problems are endless and we ended up having to buy third party apps just to get exchange syncing properly on half of them. Others just gave up and use their own nokias / blackberry / androids to recieve mail and the company mobile for calls.

Unless they have a serious change of management in the phone section at m$ this will be one collossal fuck up!

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1. Tuesday 27th July 2010 08:56 GMT Anonymous Coward
  
  100's of Problem
  
  We have about 3 hundred Moto MC75 doorstops here. Problems are legion. They were purchased for a 2 year usage cycle but 1.5 years in the guys are still trying to iron out all the problems. It is a complete and utter fiasco. I laugh at the guys dealing with it on a daily basis. They would hate me, but they know I'm right :-)
  
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Monday 26th July 2010 21:31 GMT l3v5y

Thing is...

...do IT departments ever like supporting V1.0 of anything at all?

The iPhone didn't have many things that are considered critical, and then as they were added it became more popular.

WP7 has a lot of things that will be implemented in future builds, and WM6.5 is nowhere near end of life yet (oh, and WM6.6 and Embedded Handheld should fit in to the WM6.5 shaped hole).

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1. Tuesday 27th July 2010 09:08 GMT Fuzz
  
  re: Thing is
  
  "WP7 has a lot of things that will be implemented in future builds, and WM6.5 is nowhere near end of life yet (oh, and WM6.6 and Embedded Handheld should fit in to the WM6.5 shaped hole)."
  
  Problem with WM6.6 is that I can't see HTC or Samsung or any of the other Windows mobile OEMs making devices with this OS.
  
  Most of our users only use their mobiles for email and calendar so for them I don't see an issue supporting WP7, but for the rest who are using applications on their phones noone is sure what the future entails.
  
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  1. Tuesday 27th July 2010 20:49 GMT Anonymous Coward
    
    so........
    
    So it'll be fixed in the next release will it? Sure about that?
    
    Does Microsoft ever change?
    
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2. Tuesday 27th July 2010 09:08 GMT Beritknight
  
  Agreed
  
  WM6.5 and 6.6 will stay the primary focus for businesses until the next build of SCMDM ships with WP7 support and things like an IRM client are released for it.
  
  The fact that WP7 isn't 100% corporate ready at launch doesn't mean that all companies running WM handsets have to toss them out and buy Blackberries, it just means that they shouldn't make the jump to WP7 on day one. Think of it as a staggered release instead:
  
  Late 2010 - release WP7 for consumers and small-mid sized businesses who don't use IRM, SCMDM or deploy custom apps
  
  Early-mid 2010 - WP7 launched with support tools for large business/corporate.
  
  I honestly think it's a sensible enough path for Microsoft to take. Consumers and small businesses are early adopters, so you get the 1.0 release of your product ready for them. Corporates are always going to hold off for at least six months, so that gives you some lead time to build the supporting products and large-scale management tools that those corporates will need.
  
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Monday 26th July 2010 21:32 GMT Trevor_Pott

Good bye Windows phones!

You were vaguely interesting while you existed. Looks like RIM will maintain its corporate stranglehold for a little while yet...

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Tuesday 27th July 2010 08:48 GMT Alastair 7

Rock, hard place

MS are in quite the bind here. They need a new smartphone platform yesterday, but they need to provide the infrastructure business customers need. So this is a risk- hoping that people will stick with 6.5 while they build up the new support system around 7. It might pay off, it might not.

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Tuesday 27th July 2010 08:52 GMT GrantB

Silverlight FAIL

WTF - "Windows Phone 7 uses Microsoft's Silverlight" - then you find "Applications that rely on Silverlight or Adobe's Flash in Internet Explorer won't work either, as IE for Windows Phone 7 won't support plug-ins for Flash or Silverlight."

Ok, so MS are still trying to push Silverlight uphill, but to have it on the phone but not have it work with websites, is just an epic fail.

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Tuesday 27th July 2010 08:56 GMT MG

Just as I was getting peeved with Android ...

... for not providing some of the business basics that I had taken for granted with WM, MS go and shoot themselves in the foot again with Phone 7.

If they had just resisted the urge to charge with the pack and focused on improving their core offering they might have found the way back to some customers but noooo ... lacking both the vision and the creativity internally (from the top down) it's just another embarrassing own goal.

Paris because MS is another dumb blond pissing away a pile of inherited wealth ...

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Tuesday 27th July 2010 09:08 GMT Anonymous Coward

How the hell did MS screw up Windows Mobile

I'm curious. I stil rate the TyTn II (sadly, lost in the back of a taxi) as one of the best phones I've ever owned but like Nokia, Microsoft seems to have failed completely to understand where the market is going. Now it looks like a three horse race between Apple, RIM and Android.

At this point, my money is on Android to be the dominant mobile platform just a couple of years down the line and I think Microsoft and Nokia will be paying for their idiocy for years to come.

AC because his Jobsness might be able to trace anything I do here back to my (much loved) iPhone 3Gs and turn me into a pair of smoking shoes......

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1. Tuesday 27th July 2010 21:11 GMT Anonymous Coward
  
  You cannot be serious!
  
  You had a TyTn II and you think it's better than an iPhone!
  
  The TyTn II I had was the worst phone I've ever had! Did you ever take yours out in sunlight....no, scrap that, dim overcast day and try and make out what the damn thing had screwed up again?
  
  Got myself a 3GS as soon as I could and I just can't tell you the difference it's made to my business. The 3GS actually works, unlike that heavy POS I used to use.
  
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Tuesday 27th July 2010 09:08 GMT Shannon Jacobs

As a veteran and victim of Windows Mobile

I kind of wish the article included a list of some of the sucker companies--to sell short. Oh well, just as well it didn't. The stock market is even stupider and crazier than Windows Mobile. You can never tell for sure how long you have to hold the short position, no matter how stupid the company's actions--as in using Windows Mobile. (A turd by any other name smells just as bad.)

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Tuesday 27th July 2010 09:12 GMT Mikel

Bing Is Not Google

Also, integrated search on the phone that can only use Bing.

An app store that rejects applications that compete with Microsoft's apps.

Microsoft Office, but without that nuisance Copy & Paste feature.

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Tuesday 27th July 2010 09:16 GMT Anonymous Coward

Madness...

Are MS seriously saying that the only way I could, as a company, load a company specific app onto my company's WP7 phones is to put in their application market place and limit who can use it?

If that is true then its seriously stupid.

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Tuesday 27th July 2010 09:49 GMT The_Police!

Uh oh!

Looks like Fail incoming!

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Tuesday 27th July 2010 09:51 GMT Lionel Baden

meh

i cant see any single major player buying 250 + phones for deployement in their company on the day of release !!!

so to be hohnest it doesnt really matter.

Its not a bad strategy at the moment, let small companies work out the kinks on a 1 to 1 basis with clients then just enable the ability to do edit all the settings that caused issues via a management console 6 months later

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Tuesday 27th July 2010 09:51 GMT James Chaldecott

Not a business phone, anyway

This isn't news.

I watched the WP7 announcement at PDC (via the internet), and they made it pretty clear that v1.0 is targeted squarely at consumers, not businesses. Not exactly a surprise that it doesn't have the tools required to support businesses, then, is it?

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Tuesday 27th July 2010 15:05 GMT OffBeatMammal

at least one business betting big

from the Reg just the other day...

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2010/07/22/microsoft_staff_windows_7_phone/

I imagine that a lot of the business critical functionality will get there pretty quickly :)

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Tuesday 27th July 2010 23:57 GMT Henry Wertz 1

Wow...

just wow. Win Phone 7 didn't sound good, but you'd think Microsoft could at least get it to work with Microsoft's own phone management products.

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Tuesday 27th July 2010 23:58 GMT Anonymous Coward

Windows Mobile is Dead

Lets face it... Whether you like it or not Windows Mobile is dead. Dead and buried. Microsoft need to do something utterly radical in order to revive it as a consumer platform... if they don't get that customer base back then there really is no point having a business platform as no employees will use or want clunky windows based phones. They absolutely have to try to build a platform that is as good if not better than iPhone and Android. It's the simple stuff like "plug it in and back it up". I'm an IT professional with years and years of experience and I'd stuck with WM right from the start (and I feally have been a WM user through and through) but after a decade of the platform not even being able to do the basics I finally gave up. We mobile users need to be able to do very very simple things like be able to plug our phones in and back them up without grappling with daft activesync nonsense and activesync just stopping working after a while for no apparent reason. We need to be able to browse and download apps without the nonsense of having to choose where to install them. We need to be able to take calls without the phone saying "sorry you can't answer the incoming call" or without it even telling you you've had a call. It's a fact that iPhones on the whole just work. Microsoft need to sack the senior management in the mobile division and hire new talent that can actually bring a mobile platform to market that people actually want to use. Only then will it filter down to business users.

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1. Thursday 29th July 2010 08:34 GMT Beritknight
  
  Windows Phone 7
  
  While I agree with most of your points, you seem to be about a year too late. You're ranting about WinCE and WinMo upto and including 6.5. This is the bit that throws me:
  
  "Microsoft need to sack the senior management in the mobile division and hire new talent that can actually bring a mobile platform to market that people actually want to use. Only then will it filter down to business users."
  
  Have you actually seen WinPhone 7? The whole point was that they have fired all the old people, brought in new people, and produced something completely new. They already did that, the new talent has been bevering away for months and we're now starting to see what they've produced. Are you seriously advocating that they should now fire this lot as well and bring in some even newer talent?
  
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