Charlie Kindel’s posted about some internal planning that the team did as part of building Windows Phone 7 series. I’m assuming that this isn’t an ordered list but I’m also guessing that this was the order the points were on some list somewhere (perhaps as they were written on a whiteboard during a brainstorming session). If this is the case, it’s concerning that “It’s easy to build beautiful applications users just love" falls at the bottom of the list.
For those that are familiar with Windows Mobile development you’ll have gone through the list and gone yep, yep, yep to most of the points. Most of these points we could achieve on the current Windows Mobile platform (perhaps with the exception of protecting the developers IP and until recently a single marketplace). Where Windows Mobile sucks is the ability to generate awesome applications that users really want to use – it’s not impossible by the way, just hard to do. Actually, it’s hard to do this full stop. I’d almost stake my life on it that despite Microsoft’s attempt at making it easy to build “beautiful” applications, beauty is definitely in the eye of the beholder and we are going to get some hideous creations appearing on the marketplace.
I’m looking forward to MIX next week when we’ll hear just how great we can my Windows Phone 7 series applications.