Windows Phone 7 in depth: A fresh start

by Matt Buchanan

updated 7/19/2010 11:15:01 AM ET

PREVIEW

"What's this?" a girl at a party asked, as I handed her my phone. She touched a square, and everything flipped away. "It's Microsoft's brand new phone. Kind of like a fresh start," I explained. "Oh. It's... neat." 

That's the most apt way to describe Windows Phone 7, really. It's a fresh start, and it's neat. It's a clean slate that Microsoft can use as a foundation to build something entirely new, and it's not like any other phone you've used. It manages to do something that's sadly rare for Microsoft, which is to leverage all of these different Microsoft products and services — Bing, Xbox Live, Zune to name a few—and seamlessly bring them together in a single, polished product. Which is exactly what Windows Phone 7 needs to be. (Msnbc.com is an NBC Universal-Microsoft joint venture.)

                                                                                                               All images courtesy of Gizmodo
      Phone 7 manages to do something that's rare for Microsoft, which is to leverage different Microsoft products and services


Windows Phone 7 is coming out this year, in the next few months — October, possibly — and the basic rundown of "What is Windows Phone 7?" can be found here and here. The version that I've been using for the last few days on prototype hardware (a Samsung phone which will never be sold) has been variously described to me by Microsoft as "beta 2," a "close-to-release-candidate build" and a "technical preview." Developers will be getting phones loaded with it shortly in order to have apps ready for launch. It's representative of what the final Windows Phone 7 interface and experience will be like, though two critical parts were missing, because they're still under heavy construction: Xbox Live and the Apps Marketplace.

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Microsoft Running Out of Excuses

I’m wondering what excuses Microsoft will invent to explain away the fact that Apple has now surpassed Microsoft in terms of market value. The unofficial version from Microsoft, delivered over the past few years in off-the-record conversations, has basically boiled down to the notion that investors are fickle creatures who are so swept up in Apple’s hype and hysteria that they fail to see how great Microsoft still is. [NEWSWEEK has a content-sharing partnership with msnbc.com, a joint venture of Microsoft and NBC Universal.]

But honestly, when you look at charts like this one from The New York Times you do start to wonder how this once powerful company could have fallen so far so fast.

And it is getting harder and harder for Microsoft to keep insisting that its CEO, Steve Ballmer, is doing a great job.

Last year I wrote a column for NEWSWEEK explaining how poorly Microsoft has performed in the 10 years since Ballmer took over.

I followed up soon after that with an essay for NEWSWEEK predicting that Ballmer would be pushed out of the company in 2010.

All I did was point out the obvious. Microsoft stock has been a dud under Ballmer. The Vista operating system was a disaster. Microsoft missed pretty much every big, new important market for the past decade: Internet search (Google), digital music (Apple), social networking (Facebook). Microsoft once had a lead in mobile-phone software, and now has become an also-ran.

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