Perry Reed

I is indeed slow and buggy, but that's not why I hate. It seems clear to me that the designers really didn't "get" social networking when they built it. I can't see everything my friends post, only some of it. I can post videos, but not edit them. I can post photos, but not tag them. I can see status updates, but only the most recent comment to them, not the chain of comments that usually are made up of fun conversations by my friends. I can't search for or add new friends. Nor are my FB contacts connected to my Outlook contacts.

I do think the social networking in general is important and Microsoft should incorporate it into WM 7, but that's not the most major change they need to make.

It's clear that the iPhone has changed the game in terms of how users interact with their phones, or more accurately, how the phones react to the users. The finger-friendly capacitive screen and the accelerometer let the iPhones react much more naturally to the user than the old stylus and resistive screen. This is the primary game changer and Microsoft has been painfully slow to recognize it.

The good news is, that it needn't take that long to adjust to it. Palm and Google have both produced modern, usable, good operating systems for their phones. I don't know why it is taking Microsoft so long. I know that Palm and Google weren't worried about any backwards compatibility, but frankly Microsoft could have avoided that problem, too, by branding the new OS with the Zune name rather than Windows Mobile. Yes, it would have annoyed some people, including me, but they'd still be in the game now rather than asking customers to wait another year or more.

I like WM6.5 well enough, but without HTC and others, it'd be pretty dismal for WM at this point. I'm glag Ballmer is starting to see this and maybe he'll kick the right butts into gear and we'll see WM7 sooner rather than later.

__________________
--
Perry Reed
My regular blog || My flying blog