@conanheath
I think you make some good points.
MS can't have another 7 to 8 fiasco.
That bares the question, what exactly do you mean by "fiasco"?
At the height of the WP7/WP8 nerd-rage, people were mad because they felt they would miss out on all the new WP8 features. However, just like you mentioned, there really aren't any "killer features" in WP8 beyond what WP7 could already do. Some even suggest that WP7.8 is better (
here). As it turns out, this fear was completely baseless. WP8.0 was only about bringing the WP7.x feature set to new hardware. Not much else. Going from WP8
.x to WP9 may be similar.
The angry mob also feared they wouldn't get a single app update, not to mention a single new app, after WP8 was released. This too turned out to be completely baseless. WP7.x doesn't get every single app, but they get a lot, including the good stuff like the latest version of Nokia Drive and Skulls of the Shogun. Both run great on WP7.x devices. App Updates? My old Lumia 800 still gets those almost every day too. What happened? Many devs just haven't yet made the switch to WP8. Many are still targeting WP7.x and those apps also run on WP8.
It certainly was a fiasco however. Not a fiasco in the way people expected though. Nobody was cheated out of anything. It was a PR fiasco. Driven mainly by Microsoft's complete failure to communicate what they were doing and why. Unfortunately, that continues to this day.
If people are going to deal with fragmented OS they will just go Android and at least get the features they want.
Fragmentation occurs when a developer must explicitly take differences in hardware or software configurations into account. With too much fragmentation, developers have no chance of testing their app under every possible configuration their app may encounter "out in the wild". That introduces a lot of risk (undiscovered bugs), which is when consumers also notice the negative side effects of fragmentation. However, this isn't the situation we have with WP7 and WP8 today:
If your app requires the more powerful hardware > target WP8
If your app doesn't require any specific hardware > target WP7.8 (provided you follow the rules, it will also run on WP8)
In both cases, the developer has exactly one hardware and one software configuration to program against. Nothing else needs consideration. That isn't fragmentation.
8 was a step back from 7 in most regards. People won't go through that again. The OS is already 2 yrs from being on par with a+a. If MS is going two steps back, one step forward, they might as well get out of mobile.
Absolutely agree! Like I said elsewhere, if WP8 was more ubiquitous, Microsoft would now have a Vista level PR nightmare on their hands.
However, without the low level kernel overhaul, I see no reason why we should see such problems again. I expect that WP9 (or whatever they call it) will also be mainly a hardware update. That is fine by me. Just the step backwards in OS features and stability must be avoided, otherwise it's "game over".