changes

Windows Phone 8 is the second mobile reset for Microsoft in the same amount of years, and it’s left a lot of WP7 users angry and confused. Without Windows Phone 7, there would have been a two-year hiatus in the mobile space for Microsoft, and no user base at all for the introduction of Windows Phone 8.

Pocket Lint had an exclusive chat with a senior product manager for Windows Phone, Greg Sullivan earlier in the week, and among other things he confirmed that it made no sense to wait for Windows phone 8.

“We reset our mobile strategy in early 2009. And in late 2010 we delivered a product based on that approach. We went back to the drawing board and started over,”"We didn’t start over from an architecture point of view, but we went very ‘low’. It did lots of things, but not what we have today with Windows Phone 8.”

Windows Phone 7 was always destined to be superseded, the main point being made

perhaps more importantly for Microsoft, seeing that Apple’s iPhone was dominating the smartphone market, and Google’s Android platform was starting to get traction, Microsoft didn’t want to wait any longer.

“In 2009 it didn’t seem a good idea to wait for multi-core processor support,” Sullivan rationalised.

The intro that we saw on the 21st barely scratched the surface of what is possible for Windows Phone 8, showing us the stand out consumer features, and following on from their surface announcement, are we seeing a new Microsoft emerging. Windows 8, Windows Phone 8, Windows RT, all designed to fluidly work together, seem to be slowly changing the way people in the tech industry view the brand.

While the initial furore over the “No upgrade path from WP7 to WP8” has settled, and people start to look at the possibilities this “unified core” approach will create, I think this little clip of Steve Wozniak, Apple co-founder, sums up nicely the near future for Microsoft.

It’s a new era, and a reset across the board for Microsoft, now if they can only manage to make “Windows” a covetable brand!

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