The recent 'miscommunication' by the group program manager for Cortana team is a major and potential catastrophic blunder on the part of Microsoft. While the back peddling has already started and they are now trying to spin it so it appears less destructive as it is it is really very bad!
This is not a small thing here. It signals that even when Microsoft has not yet released this service to their own ecosystem they are at least thinking of bringing it to competing eco systems. The response has been laughable at best and may actually do even more damage as it, again, brings up they may do this 'at a later stage' and 'after the Windows Phone experience is optimal'.
It's just silly and shows how much within the company there is a severe lack of communication and management at the highest level. If I were Nadella I would have Ash removed and come out myself saying all this was a blunder on his part and corrective action has been taken. That said, it's obviously the truth and they just opened Pandora's box wit this one. All signs so far show that Windows Phone really is not at the forefront of what Microsoft as a whole is doing with key services and apps rolling out for competing eco systems first leaving WP with a less then stellar experience.
Couple that with the IMO horrific excuses Joe Belfiore has been tweeting lately about the dismantling of the hubs in WP where he basically states that instead of MSFT pulling together and creating the best possible built in experience (see iOS/Apple) they decided top open up the API and let 3rd parties do it. This is the worst possible course of action as the '3rd party' developers are just not there (yet) and the few good ones have better things to do then to do MSFTs job for them (for free). They try and spin it as a goo dthing but in reality is makes it all much more ugly and less intuitive. The way you post status updates to social media was clean and simple, it's now already fragmented in how to do this and this will only get worse as the onslaught of sub-standard apps will start to get thrown together by hopeless developers just throwing together a quickie to cash in on ad revenue.
Nokia has done a superb job of pulling WP out of the mud, getting it back on track and moving in the right direction at a decent pace over the past two years. Now, in the short time since MSFT has acquired the Devices and Services part they have managed to derail most of it. Unless they pull a major rabbit with WP9 I am not hopeful the OS will go anywhere and would not be surprised to instead see WP become a AOSP variant with a live tile skin.
This is not a small thing here. It signals that even when Microsoft has not yet released this service to their own ecosystem they are at least thinking of bringing it to competing eco systems. The response has been laughable at best and may actually do even more damage as it, again, brings up they may do this 'at a later stage' and 'after the Windows Phone experience is optimal'.
It's just silly and shows how much within the company there is a severe lack of communication and management at the highest level. If I were Nadella I would have Ash removed and come out myself saying all this was a blunder on his part and corrective action has been taken. That said, it's obviously the truth and they just opened Pandora's box wit this one. All signs so far show that Windows Phone really is not at the forefront of what Microsoft as a whole is doing with key services and apps rolling out for competing eco systems first leaving WP with a less then stellar experience.
Couple that with the IMO horrific excuses Joe Belfiore has been tweeting lately about the dismantling of the hubs in WP where he basically states that instead of MSFT pulling together and creating the best possible built in experience (see iOS/Apple) they decided top open up the API and let 3rd parties do it. This is the worst possible course of action as the '3rd party' developers are just not there (yet) and the few good ones have better things to do then to do MSFTs job for them (for free). They try and spin it as a goo dthing but in reality is makes it all much more ugly and less intuitive. The way you post status updates to social media was clean and simple, it's now already fragmented in how to do this and this will only get worse as the onslaught of sub-standard apps will start to get thrown together by hopeless developers just throwing together a quickie to cash in on ad revenue.
Nokia has done a superb job of pulling WP out of the mud, getting it back on track and moving in the right direction at a decent pace over the past two years. Now, in the short time since MSFT has acquired the Devices and Services part they have managed to derail most of it. Unless they pull a major rabbit with WP9 I am not hopeful the OS will go anywhere and would not be surprised to instead see WP become a AOSP variant with a live tile skin.