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A Developer Makes Noise About Leaving WP7 And MS Calls Him

There’s an interesting bit of a story that’s playing out since a developer named Daniel Tuppeny issued a post about how he loves Windows Phone 7 but was considering leaving it. He actually got a call from Brandon Watson and Ben Lower of Microsoft. So you can read it in full, here’s his original post titled “Why I’m Close to Giving Up on Windows Phone 7, as a User and a Developer” and today’s follow up post Windows Phone 7 Part Deux. If nothing else, this shows that Microsoft is listening and taking the time to try to keep developers. Of course, that doesn’t resolve the overarching frustration that Dan and a lot of us are feeling – namely that Windows Phone has a lot of ground to make up and we’re not really hearing much in terms of incremental updates or bug fixes. Here’s some of what Dan says took place on their call though:

– The WP7 launch in the U was acknowledged as limited because of its disconnect from the US

– Error logs exist on WP7 developer phones so that MS can see and retrieve error logs but that doesn’t currently exist on retail phones but MS will now consider adding this to developer unlocked phone

– MS will look into providing a change log/release notes with updates to add to transparency

– And on the big one, updates, he notes that the excuse that big companies move slower is not an excuse

I share Dan’s frustration about a lack of transparency and the speed of releasing updates. On a new product we’d expect to see a lot of updates in the beginning like Android had but sadly we’re talking about Mango which is about 9 months away as being the next update. No bug fixes or incremental updates even though we saw Mango on stage already so that means the next 9 months is tweaking multitasking, app switching, Twitter integration, cloud support and IE9 integration. This doesn’t address the fact that I can’t attach a pdf to an email (I can only forward it which is obscene) or the fact that there are no APIs for the digital compass or access to videos. I don’t want to go into my biggest nits but I bet any WP7 user can count a dozen small nits that they wish were fixed immediately and which don’t take 9 months.

Let’s hope MS gets the memo that everyone else has gotten. We want incremental updates. We want bug fixes. We want to close the gap and not watch the rest of the industry fly by while we dream about what WP7 could be.

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