Slashdot Mirror
A Windows Phone 7 For Every Microsoftie
theodp writes "So, how can Microsoft guarantee its Windows Phone 7 devices will enjoy broader adoption than the ill-fated Kin? By giving every Microsoft employee a free one, that's how. A Microsoft spokesman confirmed the move, explaining that the idea is to thank employees for all their work, and make sure that they have experience with Windows Phone 7 devices. Microsoft has nearly 90,000 employees worldwide."
You can give your employees a phone, but you can't make them actually use it.
Call the employee on each day when the employee is scheduled to work. If the employee doesn't pick up, record it as an absence.
I've been using this so-called OS for a while and I am quite positive that when Microsoft made the move from the unstable, bluescreening, freezing, and crashing Windows 95/98/ME 16-bit kernel to the stable Windows NT 3.51/4.0/XP/2000 32-bit kernel they had to do something with the 16-bit operating system developers so they made them all work on Windows Mobile! This is the only logical explanation as to why Windows Mobile sucks so bad, freezes so often, crashes every week, and manages to screw up my phone ever few months on its own corrupting all data... for the last three Windows Mobile phones that I owned. All builds of Windows Mobile 6.5.5 are so horrible from one to another with major changes to the GUI and lack of stability that I have had to downgrade my phone back to 6.5.0 to get some stability and usefulness out of the phone.
Windows Mobile 7 is now made incompatible with 6.5 and earlier versions just sounds like Microsoft is trying to push OS/2 on people by calling it better than Windows 3.11 without the compatibility shims.
I'm just looking for a new Google Android based phone to come out on a CDMA (US - Sprint, Verizon) network that has GSM capabilities with a SIM card and a full-size keyboard, such as the HTC Touch Pro 2 that I currently have to use and endure the Windows Mobile crap. Once that is out I'm ditching Windows Mobile forever!
I have a hard time understanding why they are using the Windows brand for their phone OS. Does it share anything with their desktop OS? At this point (especially on a phone), the Windows brand has negative value. At least they didn't tack on a .net or live.
You keep going on about Apple and features. I was involved with developing user training for the first gen iPhone and I can tell you, what features YOU want didn't make version one based on very careful market research and engineering tradeoffs.
It's not like Apple said, "nobody wants remote wipe so we aren't going to do it". Instead, they said, "we have X amount of schedule and Y amount of budget, so we have to decide what is more important to our target audience: a great iPod interface, or some dorky enterprise tools." And it's not like they just accidentally forgot to include copy/paste in the OS either--they practically invented copy/paste (they were the first to map them to their current keyboard shortcuts of command C and V, respectively).
In short, if you needed a business phone with enterprise features, you most likely already had a blackberry. If you wanted a consumer device that would suffice as a business phone (with limitations), then you might have bought an iPhone.
Features, although great, cost you time and money (It's time and labor or T&L in my world). T&L represents development, QA, documentation, training, support, and long term maintenance from those teams as well.
Once you have a feature, you expect to have it forever. From Waynes World, Garth said it right. "We fear change. Change is Evil!". We can give you a different way to do it, or take away a feature. But who wants that?
BTW, the original comments ability to get some Invader Zim into a topic. Classic. Love JTHM.