Quote:
Originally Posted by virain
Unlike desktop version of MS OS, that is marketed directly to consumer (you can assemble computer yourself without much of a knowledge how it works and spare parts available in any computer store), WM is marketed directly to OEMs. So here's conflict of interests. Consumer wants reliable, responsive, useful and inexpensive device, while manufacturer wants to increase its bottom line selling as much devices as possible and that means keep them more affordable, and solution is to sacrifice performance by using less expansive, hence less powerful and less reliable parts.
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But that's also true in the PC world. Microsoft certainly markets Windows to OEMs, and they have the same self-interests as Windows Mobile OEMs.
The fact that a user
can buy and install Windows is a difference, but I'm not sure how much that factors in to the equation. Most users don't build their own systems, and I suspect very few upgrade (with both XP and Vista, I think the recommendation has been
not to upgrade, but to get the latest if you're buying -- or building -- a new system).
I also don't believe the real issue is generic parts as whydidnt said (PCs can have several different flavors of x86 processors from various chip makers like Intel, AMD, Via, etc.; Windows Mobile devices can have several different flavors of ARM processors from Samsung, Qualcomm, etc.), but limited resources. In older PDAs, maybe there wasn't enough memory to build a robust abstraction layer, so that's why OEMs have to build parts of the OS themselves. Think of it as people programming in Assembler in the bad old days vs. memory-intensive object-oriented frameworks today.
Are we at a point where we can take the next step in making the system less dependent on OEMs and carriers? I don't know, but I certainly hope so.
Steve