Harry - 6:38 pm on Sep 12, 2010 (gmt 0)

@ByronM, I don't know if you work for Microsoft, but if you do, you have the wrong attitude while addressing the concerns of a genuine developer. It's just more of that smug attitude that makes me doubt Microsoft Windows 7 will be a relevant platform to develop for and that Microsoft won't try to screw small devs like me, like they used to.

1-I don't care about XNA/Xbox Live. Coming from Android, iOS and Palm, I don't care about these. I'm not a big shop, so I don't make multimillion dollars games with a team of 60-100 devs and designers.

2-Microsoft should have made entry into their program free or dirt cheap, like Google. That $100 license for only six app is not a good deal. Instead of thinking of how they could support devs, all they cared about was applying game and sales logic to their dev program. So if you pay $100 for six apps, you'll be encouraged to make five other apps after porting or creating from scratch your first apps with WP7. Instead of focusing more on the needs of the devs who needs to make sure his first app is a success, all they care in trying to maximize their sales models with devs.

By the way, I still didn't get any free phone from MS. I'm waiting, but if I don't get one, they won't get any apps from me. MS is untested, they have to make sure I can at least get a free phone from them and not take such a risks on an unproven vaporware - it's vaporware as I can,t buy one yet.

3-Copy paste, multitasking and access to several apis is missing in 1.0 Office is useless without copy and paste. Without muiltitasking, I can't work with a doc and xls files at the same time. Too painful.

I don't care about Zune. Full Facebook integration is a 2009 feature that came with Palm. Not something to tout in 2010. The feature set barely matches that of an 2007 iPhone. I don't really care about XBox. I'm not a gamer.

4-The Kin cost Microsoft 1 billion dollar. It didn't know 1 billion dollar was pocket change. The Kin shows the confusion and inner wars at Microsoft. They fired Allard, the visionary in their team and they still think they can pull off the launch of WP7 without the creative juices of the guys who had vision. Right now all they have left are the code monkeys and plaid shirt middle managers.

The Kin was a big investment for Microsoft and they totally blew it -less than six months ago. If it had been a failure from 10 years ago, one could have brushed it off. But right now, the people responsible for killing the Kin are still making decisions for Microsoft and they still don't seem to get the mobile world.

Dismiss the recent kin failure as much as you want, but it is a a reflection of who Microsoft is today. It's crap like that that scars devs like me. I can,t trust Microsoft to stay the course on a project that's not in its entrenched business space, like Windows and Office.

Make fun of the Courier, but it is exactly the type of project that Microsoft needed to pull. Argue that it wasn't for the public as much as you like - yeah right it wasn't for the public. Microsoft has been toying with tablets for a decade and it took Apple to show them how to do it right - Well they still haven't done anything having killed the project.

@seo99, you don't know a thing about Android. I'm not an Android cheerleader, but I would never make comments like saying Android is a copy of iOS. It is not. Android is for one thing an attempt a smartphone OS, but that's where the similarity with iOS ends. Android has a completely different philosophy and it's not about openness. People make fun of the Android fragmentation and diversity of specs all the time. I do agree that a vertical approach to smartphone OS is better, but Android is becoming a vertical solution for many manufacturers. Instead of mocking Android, Microsoft should learn and pay attention to what's happening there. It's literally the most active scene on the smartphone OS world, except maybe for Palm's webOS.