In just over a week we (finally!) get to pull the cover off of the Windows Phone application & game developer experience at MIX10. There, through keynotes and more than 12 technical sessions over 3 days, we will “tell all” about the what and how of the new developer platform for Windows Phones.
Today, I get to talk about the why. My previous post on focus hinted at this, but today I get to be even more explicit. In fact, I’m literally down in San Francisco and talking with a few industry watchers about our platform strategy and thought I’d invite you all to the conversation as well.
In addition to the update I’ll share below, we’ll be taking questions via Twitter at @WP7dev (use #wp7dev as well) starting at 6PM PST tonight.
In our announcement of Windows Phone 7 Series at Mobile World Congress on February 15 you saw just how different Windows Phone 7 Series is. It’s different from what we’ve done in the phone space before and it’s different from other phones.
Different is often good. Especially when it’s different for good reasons. Windows Phone 7 Series is different because we reset everything we were doing to focus on end user experience. This extends directly to the developer platform.
Developers, designers, and producers of applications, games, and content these days are demanding that we be different as well. Over the last year we’ve had face to face conversations with 100s of developers all over the world about what we should do with Windows Phone 7 Series. We heard they want:
Microsoft had to change its strategy to accommodate what developers have been asking for. Specifically developers told us to
The Windows Phone 7 Series developer platform is as different as the new user experience. It’s fresh. It’s pure. And it’s powerful.
We took the feedback we gathered from developers, looked at the full potential of Windows Phone 7 Series and landed on 3 basic goals for the platform we’re delivering;
The first one is pretty obvious: A key value proposition for Windows Phone is personal. We believe consumers will use games and applications to make their phone experience their own.
(Did you notice we always talk about applications and games? A little factoid I heard today: According eMarketer, the number of people playing games on the phone has more than doubled in recent years;340M people will play games on the phone in 2010 up from 155M in 2007).
But what do we mean by “profit” in the second goal? When we talk with developers we hear them talk about three different “currencies”: making money, learning, and recognition. Some developers are in it for the money. They are either literally being paid to write code or they are writing code with the hope it will generate coin.
Other developers tell us they are interested in advancing their knowledge – love of the game. They love learning about computers, programming, games, social connections, etc… So they build software to learn. They profit by being smarter.
Other developers are clearly motivated by pride. Maybe there’s a bit of money and learning involved, but to these developers being noticed or recognized as doing wickedly epic sh*t is top of the list for how they measure profit.
We think all three “currencies” are valid and important and we are explicitly trying to build the platform and developer experience to support “profit” in each.
The last goal really points to our long term strategy. We hear from people that they want to be able to experience software no matter what screen they are using. The phone, the PC, or the TV. Combine this concept with “Software+Service” and it’s pretty obvious what “3 screens + cloud” means.
I mentioned in my last post that one of our principles was “to build upon the shoulders of giants; where possible integrate instead of create.” It won’t come as a surprise to many to learn that the Windows Phone 7 developer experience builds upon the following GIANTS (among others):
Different often means change. A quick glance at Amazon.com shows me there are literally hundreds of current books on how to manage change in organizations. We all know change can be hard. It’s hard even when you know there’s tremendous upside.
For us, the cost of going from good to great is a clean break from the past. To enable the fantastic user experiences you’ve seen in the Windows Phone 7 Series demos so far we’ve had to break from the past. To deliver what developers expect in the developer platform we’ve had to change how phone apps were written. One result of this is previous Windows mobile applications will not run on Windows Phone 7 Series.
To be clear, we will continue to work with our partners to deliver new devices based on Windows Mobile 6.5 and will support those products for many years to come, so it’s not as though one line ends as soon as the other begins.
The expertise and familiarity with our tools is not lost. If you are a .NET developer today your skills and much of your code will move forward. If you are Silverlight or XNA developer today you’re gonna be really happy. New developers to the platform will find a cohesive, well designed API set with super productive tools.
At MIX you will find out that it’s never been easier, more fun, or more rewarding to create beautiful & compelling phone experiences. Windows Phone 7 Series is a different kind of phone and the development platform offers a different kind of opportunity. Our mission is to help developers go after the next generation of mobile customers with an amazing set of tools and technologies. Developers will be able to bring new kinds of content to more screens and markets faster.
See you there.
P.S. If you like blogs, I suggest you follow these guys as well; they are all part of the extended team of people at Microsoft who are helping to deliver the new platform.
Andre Vrignaud: www.ozymandias.com / @ozymandias
Christian Schormann: electricbeach.org / @cschormann
Shawn Hargreaves: blogs.msdn.com/shawnhar / @shawnhargreaves
Todd Brix: windowsteamblog.com/blogs/windowsphone / @toddbrix
Anand Iyer: www.artificialignorance.net/blog / @ai
Michael Klucher: klucher.com / @mklucher
[Edit: 9:16PM PST 3/4/2010 - Fixed Christian's twitter handle]
"we reset everything we were doing to focus on end user experience"
Platform continuity was the single most important feature of Windows Mobile. Being able to run code from 2003 on a current phone is more important to our customers than a fancy UI (which Microsoft seems not able to get right anyway). Further, the ability to access hardware specific APIs through P/Invoke has been vital in many of our projects (e.g. to use Bluetooth in the early days). Those advantages have now gone. You just rendered useless years of development work and many thousands of lines of code.
"we will continue to work with our partners to deliver new devices based on Windows Mobile 6.5 and will support those products for many years to come"
You will, I bet. But which device manufacturer will produce such "dead-end" devices?
Time to switch to another mobile OS.
Kind regards,
tamberg
Will SQL CE be accessable to Silverlight?
I have to agree with tamberg. No sane company would commit to Windows Mobile, and every company that is currently invested in it must now be desperately looking for an exit strategy.
By dropping backward compatibility you have basically just killed Windows Mobile, and since your new platform will be very unfriendly to enterprise and is years behind developer and consumer adoption, you have basically killed Microsoft's mobility ambitions.
By listening to the blogosphere demanding a "new start" you have committed the same mistake as Palm did with WebOS. Things are working out pretty well for them, isn't it.
Look forward to 1% market share in 2011 also.
I would have to disagree with the previous commenters. If you honestly won't look into a new technology because it might not support something you wrote 7 years ago, you're in the wrong field.
As far as the 1% market share comment goes, I wouldn't be so quick to assume that a handful of grumpy developers will cripple sales. For every dev who grumbles about supporting outdated code, there are probably 2 waiting to put their SilverLight/WPF skills to use on a mobile device.
Overall, I think this is a good move. This is fast paced industry and developers/organizations that can't adapt will be left wanting. The pros of having new tools far outweighs the cons of dropping support for old apps.
@IanMuir
Sigh.
It's difficult to understand, but an app can be soooo much more than a fancy UI. I think most developers, us anyway, welcome the fresh start on the UI front. But if that's all we can do, develop a UI for technology that MS finds interesting, i think many of us will just let the "opportunity" pass and find another way to use our USP's.
Let's hope MS will not use their developers to fullfill MS's hidden agenda of promoting MS technologies only. As an example i use very often, i want to listen to the very popular shoutcast stations at somafm.com, but oops, the new developer environment doesn't have shoutcast streaming .
Now we have a native Opera Mini browser, do we get a browser-ballot for WP7 soon ?
Well, the UI is different. Possibly *too* different.
People like the iPhone style interface because, it's simple, intuitive, clear and fun to use.
When I look at the main WP7 screen, it's pretty dull, jumbled, and focused too much on the boring phone / message / contacts areas. Yes, they're important features, but they're a bit "in your face".
I don't mind to rewrite my code for the new WP7 and I am looking forward to have my apps running in the new WP7 fancy UI. However, I wish that WP7 will still be open enough to let me archive the same level functionality as the current WM platform. I used many kernel techs (mainly on Ndis drivers and winSock LSP) in my apps.
Interesting change. On Mobile Windows I ma an enduser. One of the few reasons I still use it is my investment in existing software. It seems there is no longer any reason for me to resist the call of Android or the iPhone.
@IanMuir:
"The pros of having new tools far outweighs the cons of dropping support for old apps."
We're not talking about the scribble applet or iFart-type applications. Our customers (companies, not end users, by the way) invested 100'000s of $ in custom mobile software running on a supposedly future-proof platform.
Regards, tamberg
One of Winmo's greatest strengths is that I can write cross-platform, standard C++ for it. The second greatest strength is that I can use the familiar, powerful Windows API. These are the /only/ things keeping me on Winmo and without them, I'll be re-evaluating which platforms I develop for.
I can only assume Microsoft is trying to capture the iPhone dev crowd, who seem to write small, typically gimmicky apps that can be made in a couple weeks. But in doing so, I worry that they're seriously tarnishing relations with anyone writing business apps.
@tamberg:
who ever told you that windows mobile was future proof? Is there any software that is future proof?
The article mentions .Net on the phone... It is not. It is SILVERLIGHT's hacked non targetable .Net. That is a smaller subset than the current Compact Framework. Silverlight 4's version of .Net only include 5 base class namespaces (and even they are not complete). There is no data access, no ado.net, nothing that leads me to think that line of business apps are being considered. Not all apps are connected 24/7 to use web data services to the cloud constantly. So I guess people are going to have to build their own stores locally? Yea, searching XML data is real efficient.
I watched the keynote yesterday and all I could think of was that Microsoft has just become Apple. Apps only through a MS controlled store. No external storage. No multitasking. etc..
All in the name of "a better user experience". Just call it what it really is. "all in the name of controlling the revenue."
Just whose phone is it anyway?
Sorry for the rant :)
>...it’s not as though one line ends as soon as
> the other begins...
From a marketing perspective this isn't true, all those delivering windows mobile solutions are now going to be selling a product on what will as of today, not years from now, be seen as an officially obsolete platform.
With Windows Phone 7 you guys have done an awesome job delivering a fantastic consumer market product, and delivering a really compelling message for the potential Windows Phone 7 for the consumer market. However, the majority of the existing Windows Mobile development community are delivering enterprise LOB applications.
I really hope you guys will soon follow up with an equally compelling story for delivering enterprise LOB applications for Windows Phone7. Which we can then pass on to our enterprise clients e.g. We have client slated for release on x quarter of 201x on Windows Enterprise Phone7.
For starters you could address how enterprise LOB apps can be securely deployed on Windows Phone7. How data can be accessed, and kept secure, support for offline scenarios etc etc.
At the moment I think the Windows Mobile community feels like they've been left exposed, out in the cold.
It's not so much we have to re-develop our applications, it's unclear if it's possible to create and deploy applications equivalent to existing Windows Mobile applications on this new platform.
http://gizmodo.com/5499819/the-rotting-corpse-of-windows-mobile-goodbye-mobile-firefox
Cheers,