Ballmer Admits "We Screwed Up Windows Mobile"

Barence writes "Microsoft boss Steve Ballmer has blasted the company's own mobile operating system at the firm's Venture Capital Summit. One tweet from an attendee claims Ballmer said the company had 'screwed up with Windows Mobile. Wishes they had already launched WM7. They completely revamped the team.' Another claims Ballmer said 'we've pumped in some new talent. This will not happen again.' It's not the first time Ballmer has attacked Windows Mobile, having publicly stated that version 6.5 was 'not the full release we wanted.'"

Comments

Title

[sopssa]

Nice way to twist the title and forget "with" too. They didn't screw up whole Windows Mobile like you could think, but they wanted to launch WM7 already.

I actually like Windows Mobile most from the mobile platforms (however, I haven't tried Android yet). It's *a lot* more open than iPhone, as in you can run any software on it that you want. Also it seems to be customizable quite much, since HTC's version is a lot different from others. And there's a lot programs available.

And dont even get me started on Symbian and the insanity to program something for it...

Re:Title

[richie2000]

They didn't screw up whole Windows Mobile like you could think

I have a Windows Mobile 6.5 phone and... Well, yes they did. Totally. I have heard that the vendors that took the time, cost and effort to customize WM6.5 have produced fairly usable products. The HP iPaq 914c Business, not so much. Not at all, frankly. But I will give them this; they have ported the unique Windows experience to the small screen - I have to reboot the phone about once a week to prevent it from locking up when answering or placing calls. This functionality was obviously a low priority. I have to go into the task manager daily to remove programs, or else they fill up the memory, even preventing the task manager from running, another condition forcing a reboot.

Executive summary/mini-review of the HP iPaq 914c: Nice hardware, lousy camera, shitty OS.

Re:Title

[manekineko2]

Unless you're an internal tester, you do not have a Windows Mobile 6.5 phone. Windows Mobile 6.5 isn't even out yet. The first phones with it are slated to ship in late October.

There are people out there with hacked ROMs running leaked builds of 6.5, but you can hardly judge the final OS based on hacked ROMs running leaked builds.

That said, yes, WinMo 6 is totally crappy. Based on my playing around with the leaked builds, WinMo 6.5 is still rather crappy. WinMo 6.5.1 is getting decent, and its UI doesn't look like it was from 2001, but it still has those general WinMo unexplained slowdowns and could use a lot of improvements.

Overall, Windows Mobile is clearly suffering from that Microsoft problem that once they think they are in charge of a market, all innovation completely stops. It's so total of a stop, it really looks intentional, but it's a little hard to believe even Microsoft execs could be so short-sighted as to purposefully derail development. Still, Internet Explorer and Windows Mobile sure look like two examples of that.

Re:Title

[gilesjuk]

Ballmer laughed off the iPhone when it came out. An appstore and a billion plus downloads later and who is laughing?

Microsoft can't even launch an mp3 player that is good, they haven't even bothered launching it in the UK and much of Europe.

Re:Title

[mvdwege]

Microsoft's big competition (and Apple's) in Europe is Symbian, no secret there.

Make that the rest of the world, not just Europe. Nokia and Sony-Eriksson are the big players in EMEA, with the Korean vendors like Samsung and LG doing brisk business in SE-Asia. Windows Mobile is struggling everywhere but in the U.S. Heck, even their flagship OEM (HTC) is now shipping Android phones.

Mart

Re:Title

[nwf]

My wife had a Palm Treo with Windows Mobile. It was the worst, most pathetic attempt at an OS I've ever seen.

It locked up constantly, got to where you could not actually make calls, ran out of memory, etc. Settings scattered through like 17 different sub-panels, combined with a ton of completely useless settings. Doing anything required far too many clicks. Bluetooth? Forget about reliability. It would just refused to connect to the headset after a while until one power cycled it. Email was painfully slow, particularly when you had attachments or images. And the need to manually delete stuff when it ran out of memory was just crazy. And audio would sometimes just stop working. No ringing, no voice, nothing.

But my favorite was how it handled text messages. Every now and then, she'd need to delete a bunch of them because it ran out of memory (a user should never have to worry about this, IMHO.) Deleting all of the messages took at least half an hour. No exaggeration. I've never seen anything that lame. It's like they were deleting the first, moving all the others down in memory, rewriting them to flash, then repeating.

Even trying to turn the thing of was nearly impossible to figure out. To reboot, it was faster to just pop out battery.

She returned one and got another, no better. She then got an iPhone and loves it.

Correction

[grub]

"We Screwed Up Windows Mobile"

s/Mobile//
There you go.

.

Re:Correction

[AndrewHowe]

No.

Whatever you think about Microsoft (and if it's the usual cult mentality, I really don't care) Microsoft have screwed up pretty badly (more than normal, if you will) on WM7.

It's hella late and they have pissed off a lot of people. I would personally really like to see Microsoft's continual presence in the mobile space if only for the sake of diversity... I'm unashamedly a Microsoft user and mostly supporter. Downmods be damned. But WM7 is pretty much a disaster area.

I hope they have something really good on the way... And even then, I worry that they're gonna let Android rule the world. Which is careless, because Android used to suck. But it's getting better very quickly, and there's still no sign of WM7.

Let me guess...

[Joce640k]

The old one was crap but the new one is perfect - just like every other Microsoft launch *ever*.

Re:Let me guess...

[PhrostyMcByte]

I don't know anything about the new one, but the old one was definitely crap.

Windows Mobile uses almost exactly the same APIs we're used to on the desktop. Anyone that knows how to code a Windows GUI app should have no trouble coding one for Mobile. Hell you can even use .NET if you want, so there is a whole other class of developers who can do it too. In short, the possible developer pool is *huge*.

The problem is, apps tend to look and feel too much like they should be running on a desktop. In their rush to make the development experience so similar, they didn't think to make the UI actually work on a phone. They completely missed the touch window. Even now, I have yet to see a really intuitive touch interface for Windows Mobile that isn't a completely custom third-party shell.

If they want to attract users, they need an intuitive UI and a single place to find apps. If they want to attract developers, they need easy tools to make intuitive UIs and a single place to sell apps. It's not a hard concept, but they're failing pretty spectacularly at it.

Re:Let me guess...

[Bert64]

It has a subset of similar APIs... It's effectively a completely unique os that uses the windows name to try and fool people into thinking it has some level of compatibility with the applications they already use...

OSX and Linux are actually much closer between their desktop and phone oriented versions, many applications can simply be recompiled (i have things like nmap on my phone for instance) tho it obviously makes a lot more sense if you design a new interface which is appropriate to the device.

In terms of interface, windows mobile has an interface designed for a desktop, which has been crudely kludged for use on a pda, and even more crudely kludged to try and make it work on the phone... The interface is just terrible.

And yes, you're right that they need a single place to find apps... But remember that's not the windows way, users should be expected to locate their apps manually by buying them in physical stores and downloading binaries from arbitrary websites... And then manually run a setup program and blindly click next a few times until it's installed.

Countless people on this very site have claimed that linux is unsuitable because it typically has a single simple place to find apps rather than doing things the same way windows does.

Journalism

[Reason58]

You have a quote directly attributed to Ballmer, and your source is some dude's tweet. Sounds legit to me.

Re:Journalism

[Anonymous Coward]

Since when does kdawson let journalistic integrity stand in the way of a good Microsoft bash?

Re:Journalism

[Concerned Onlooker]

Really, you can't bash Microsoft. Unless you run Cygwin, of course.

Getting cold

[Haxzaw]

Hell called, they say send parkas.

Pumping

[Angst Badger]

It would certainly explain a lot about the quality of the software coming out of Microsoft if their CEO is someone who thinks of "talent" as some liquid commodity you can "pump in" to a project.

ship it when it sorta works

[jollyreaper]

It's not the first time Ballmer has attacked Windows Mobile, having publicly stated that version 6.5 was "not the full release we wanted"."

But you released it anyway, didn't you, Steve? You say you're sorry but you don't mean it.

Here's how you fix that Steve...

[tha_toadman]

Developers! Developers! Developers!

Re:Manufacturers

[sopssa]

He didn't say it sucks. He said they wanted to get WM7 done already and they screwed up with *that*. Title is just misleading as hell.

Of course they screwed up Windows Mobile

[mewsenews]

The iPhone is doing gangbuster sales with a chopped version of OS X. Windows Mobile has been around much, much longer yet it was blown out of the water.

The latest Zune doesn't run Windows Mobile since Windows Mobile is crap. The latest Zune doesn't have an app store because Windows Mobile is making an app store and they don't know how it's going to turn out!

Seriously, Apple caught them asleep at the wheel.

What really happened.

[jellomizer]

Apple came along and raised the bar very high. Fan of apple or not. In terms of Mobile OS they raised the bar very high for mobile app developers of competing products and sadly Windows Mobile was just trying to be good enough for blackberry users.

So he knows there is a problem ...

[Old97]

but does he understand what the problem is? I can think of two big problems with Windows Mobile

1) Microsoft wants to sell it when their competitor O/Ss are free.

2) Window's Mobile has earned itself a bad reputation both in terms of ease of use and reliability. There were 7 WM users in my work unit a 18 months ago. Today there are zero. Five went to iPhone, 1 to Pre and one to RIM. The Pre guy has iPhone envy because using the keyboard is not what he hoped and because the Pre software being 18 months younger than iPhone's is also noticeably slower despite similar hardware. (He'll probably get over it when the upgrades arrive.) Of these 7, 5 of them were Microsoft fanboi's but even they were fed up with the bugs and the clumsy interface.

(None of these guys develop for these devices so they don't' care about any of those issues.)

So what makes him think Microsoft has time to recover from this especially if they expect to continue to charge for the O/S? What is the value proposition for the device manufacturers especially 9 months to a year from now when the free O/Ss and their tools will have had even more time to evolve and mature?

Seriously they screwed it up a long time ago

[wastedbrains]

I got in early on the PocketPC and PocketPC Phones before it was called windows mobile. They were off to a great start with, wireless, web browsers, open development tools (the embedded visual studio was free for years), open development anyone could publish an app, GPS, etc. They worked hard enough to kill Palm, and then just got buggier and worse every year. It was the same as Netscape and IE they built IE until Netscape was dead and then just quit. Windows Mobile became so bad that after years of using and developing on the platform I bought a standard phone and got rid of my Windows Mobile at the time because it had become so unstable it was unusable. Losing calendar entries, failing syncs, crashing often, dropping voice calls... Then I saw everyone with the iPhone and at first said yeah been there and done that everything on the iPhone I had on windows mobile and more for a long time... The iPhone just worked though, no fighting it, yeah it wasn't open to develop on, but I had less reason to develop my own solutions anyways because it did what I wanted out of the box. Windows Mobile, had streaming video, flash players, GPS navigation, and many things before the iPhone ever got around to it, but MS let it fall apart to crap and die once they killed the only competitor in the market Palm/Handspring.

Blame Game?

[mpapet]

Mea culpas like this are a way to soothe customers and not do anything about it.

'New talent' claims are especially suspicious because the problem, typically, is a more global work environment issue brought on by the executive staff who, coincidentally, never change.

Two years from now it will be the same speech. 5 years from now, same speech. Why? culture won't have changed.

Re:I knew it

[Randle_Revar]

Actually...

http://www.ende-der-vernunft.org/files/joern/20090221-gnufragranceg.jpg

Is that true?

[OpenSourced]

Is the Windows Mobile situation caused by an inferior platform? I always had the idea that WM was/is failing because mobile manufacturers don't want to go the way of the PC manufacturers and end up like commodity makers with razor-thin margins, leaving all fat profits, control of the complete experience and user-locking to Microsoft. They somehow, for estrange reasons, seem to mistrust Microsoft and won't put its software on its handsets. It's not a technology reason. Am I wrong? Does WM suck when compared to other mobile development platforms?

Re:Asleep at the wheel

[mewsenews]

Microsoft is very often caught "asleep at the wheel" (eg: the internet) but when they wake up and rejoin the race, they usually overtake and keep the lead permanently.

Honestly, I'm not a fan of Microsoft, but we're all sick of reading stories about how expensive and proprietary the iPhone is. When Microsoft wakes up and really nails what Google's Android is flirting with, ie. non-proprietary iPhones with sexy hardware and standard, user liberated software, it will be a huge win for customers.

It really took Apple to put everything together in one package so that wireless carriers saw "oh yeah, mobile internet", but now it's time for commoditization.

As opposed to Mac fanboys

[cvd6262]

The old one was crap but the new one is perfect - just like every other Microsoft launch *ever*.

It's the opposite with anything Apple. The *current* version is perfect... until the next version comes out... then the older version was crap.

PS - I'm a Mac user too.

Re:As opposed to Mac fanboys

[gilesjuk]

Any fan boy will say that, regardless of the platform. A fan boy is someone with an irrational brand loyalty.

I don't class myself as an Apple fan boy, I didn't get an iPhone until it was developed enough to meet my needs. I'm not sure I will get a 3GS when my contract ends in Feb 2010.

Perhaps if Ballmer spent less time criticising Apple and criticising his own product then things would be better for Windows Mobile?

WM7 is only late because it probably started life as another rehash of Windows Mobile and needed a drastic rethink when the iPhone appeared.

Hey, that's our job

[CopaceticOpus]

Microsoft bashing Microsoft? This smells like step one in their plan to take over Slashdot.

Re:The thing about WinMobile is

[dingen]

It was easier to write software fro WM 5 years ago than it is to write for iPhone today. There should be thousands of apps out there. But there aren't. Because WM after version 3 began to suck more and more.

I think there aren't so many apps for WinMo because there's no infrastructure for distribution, payment and updating your application. Sure, it's easy to create some application, but how do you get it to your users and (more important) how do you get them to pay for it?

You could stick it on your website and pray people will find it, but the reality of course is that most people won't find it. And if you want people to pay for it, you will have to figure out a way of doing so.

It requires a lot of effort from the developer to get things started. And even when he figures out how to get his infrastructure set up, it remains hard to get your application onto a user's phone. And then you release an update and it's even harder to get people to get the update on their phone.

All in all, it's a mess and no sane developer will get into it, no matter how easy it may be to create the application itself.