They need to get updates out more quickly... quarterly. This "No Donuts" mentality is wrong. Google got it right.
And they need to talk less about the updates. A nine month heads up on a smartphone update is counterproductive. They really need to just spend less time talking about stuff that isn't ready to go.
The need to turn the crank quickly and announce w/ two week windows.
With that said, I think they may have backed themselves into a corner with their OS distribution model. I don't think they can support this number of phones (and this is just the first wave of them). At least it appears that they can't. If they can't figure out how to make this work, they may need to drop to one, maybe two, phones (different configurations of the same phone is fine though). Otherwise this platform is dead.
Thanks, good to know. That gives me a little hope that at least they don't have a philosophically backwards position with respect to update frequrency.
Somehow, Google's upgrades do not tend to end up on the phones, or only with substantial delay. So I don't think claiming that "Google got it right" is accurate if you talk about smartphone software.
Google's dev process for building updates is right. They rapidly iterate to generate new updates and versions of Android. It's arguably better than iOS now, but w/ a far worse app ecosystem, IMO.
BUT Google falls down the same way WP7 does... too many phones to support. The process of getting updates to all of these different phones is painful, but Google and MS differ here too -- and this difference, while maybe cosmetic, is important.
Since Google drops source and OEMs pick it up, Google has moved the update responsibility to the OEMs. Nobody screams at Google because the Samsung Galaxys took a long time to update. It was Samsung's issue.
MS OTOH owns the update process. They get the blame for not supporting all the phones.
The end result for MS is a double whammy since they may not be able to move as quickly as Google (since Google can just drop source, and each OEM needs to get it working with their device and skin) AND Microsoft gets the blame for being slow.
The real end result for both systems is that the devices just don't get updated. The only difference is that we know that Google has produced code, and MS hasn't released any.
Blame doesn't really matter, because at the end of the day, neither Google nor MS are getting their updates out to consumers at this point. So while Android 2.4(when it comes out) might do everything better than the iPhone, stop world hunger, and cure cancer, it doesn't matter if people can't update their devices to it. They're in the exact same boat as MS.
While you make very valid points, this is the very first update for WP7. What further complicates things is that firmware upgrades from carriers/OEMs are pushed along with this update, and the need for OEM/Carrier testing further delays things.
IIRC they haven't done similar updates for Windows Mobile.While it sucks now, if MS learns from the issues, it has potential to be a better update process than Android, because users don't have to depend on OEMs which cause major delays for updates.
The key difference is that OEMs on Android are allowed to(and make) a LOT of changes to the UI etc. resulting in things like MotoBlur, HTC Sense and that Samsung skin. This results in delays of several months(or no updates at all) because of all the required changes to the UI skins which WP7 can avoid(since they don't allow OEMs to mess with internals or the UI) if they learn from the first update and speed up things.
They're sort of damned if they do, damned if they don't.
They need to let people know what the long term plans are to keep the interested in what the platform will become (especially with the Nokia deal), but at the same time it feel frustrating how far away these new features seem (talking about the "Mango" update with multi-tasking, IE9 etc coming "later" this year).
Personally I agree with you, I'd like smaller, more frequent updates, but at the same time I definitely want to know the long term roap-map.
I disagree about there being too many phones, it's a fraction of the number of Android variants out there, and the phones are much more similar to each other due to the minimum hardware specs. With that in mind, there was no excuse that the first update a few weeks ago wasn't flawless; they should have easily picked up any issue on all available models during testing.
They need to get updates out more quickly... quarterly. This "No Donuts" mentality is wrong. Google got it right.
And they need to talk less about the updates. A nine month heads up on a smartphone update is counterproductive. They really need to just spend less time talking about stuff that isn't ready to go.
The need to turn the crank quickly and announce w/ two week windows.
With that said, I think they may have backed themselves into a corner with their OS distribution model. I don't think they can support this number of phones (and this is just the first wave of them). At least it appears that they can't. If they can't figure out how to make this work, they may need to drop to one, maybe two, phones (different configurations of the same phone is fine though). Otherwise this platform is dead.