Microsoft plays favorites in Windows Phone 7 cloud picks Microsoft is betting its future on the cloud, we‘re told, and using Windows Phone 7 to lure customers in for their business, as well as personal, lives. The focus of the Windows Phone 7 launch has been on consumer use: XBOX Live, integrated Facebook and an address book that considers a contact‘s last Tweet as important as …
Sounds like it's finally dawned on Microsoft that they haven't got a hope in hell of winning over the general public and so they're half-heartedly aiming towards the corporate sector now.
I swear that in another article I read that WM6.5 was being preserved for corporate use...
Either way it's no surprise to find that social-network integration will be almost impossible for third parties on an OS that is more of a prison than a walled-garden.
Yep, this is just not good for Windows 7. A contact list that is tied to facebook and twitter, and ONLY facebook and twitter? Fail. This would be OK for some dumbphone, but for a smartphone, the user should be able to use these areas in the contact list to show other kinds of information if they so choose -- that's the point of a smartphone.
If Microsoft believe in the cloud so much, why doesn't it apply with Xbox Live (even Gold)?
i.e. Why doesn't Xbox Live work like SteamCloud on PC/Mac where profiles, saves, preferences etc are saved in the cloud rather than only on hard drive, USB memory sticks, memory units, etc?
This would be particularly useful if one uses more than one Xbox 360.
Microsft states there will be three screens and a cloud and one of those screens it the desktop!
I find this an astonishing statement from Microsoft. My contention is that the desktop is Microsoft's achillies heel. This outdated concept offers less and less to modern users and at some stage someone like Google will displace the desktop entirely with what is essentially a portal to the Internet. This new configurable internet dashboard would have dynamic connections to the internet reporting back from social media sites and from internal systems and bring the desktop alive and making it useful
If the desktop is stolen away from under Microsoft's nose then their stranglehold on our industry will be broken. Their annual profits depend so much upon shipping Windows and Office so Microsoft ought to sort out the desktop themselves before someone else does it for them. But then again innovation is not the name of the game at Microsoft is it so I'm not waiting with baited breath
Social networking integration is similarly locked down on the HTC Desire - a phone which most tech sites seem to swoon over - yet I've never heard them criticised for it. But slap the Microsoft label on a phone, and every flaw becomes fair game. I agree it's an irritation, but it's hardly an irritation that's unique to Microsoft devices.
But android makes it easy to add this; e.g. the last.fm app syncs last.fm contacts if you let it, see http://www.c99.org/2010/01/23/writing-an-android-sync-provider-part-2/ for details on how this was done.
Although you can't use a foreign messaging protocol in the built in android email app :(
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