Microsoft’s Joe Belfiore responds to criticisms. Let’s be serious folks!

News · 27 Mar 2011 · MTW Editorial Team

Microsoft Joe Belfiore got roasted after his latest appearance on Channel9 a few days ago because of what seemed like a total disconnection between his attitude and the current reality that is the slow Windows Phone 7 update process. Joe took the time to reply in the comments section and make some excuses. But before reading what he has to say let’s take a short moment to reflect on what is going on here.

Why are people mad? Is it because of the buggy state of the OS, the lack of updates,the slow roll out, or the lack of communication? First off if somebody tells you that Windows Phone 7 is a buggy mess and needs to be patched urgently then he’s over dramatizing things. Besides the Marketplace client crashes and some badly coded third party applications (which have nothing to do with MS) what are the “bugs” preventing normal usage of the handsets?. Excessive data usage bug? Hell no. I was the only website that always said that there was no data bug in WP7 and that the issue was probably coming from Yahoo’s IMAP. The facts have later shown that I was right but in the mean time you had breaking news headlines all over the place claiming that using WP7 would potentially cost you money because of the “excessive data usage bug”… Anyway,  How many times do you have to reboot your device per-day /week ? Windows Phone 7 is probably the most robust V1.0 consumer product released in the past years. Was NoDo delayed? Yes but not like most people want you to believe. I’ll repeat what I’ve been saying all along: Don’t believe everything you read and please form your opinion based on facts and logic. I was the only blog who always said that you shouldn’t expect NoDo to come out before MWC while everybody else was making up dates left and right that would later give the impression that the update was delayed when those totally bogus dates weren’t met. People are also quick to blame carriers but NoDo was effectively delayed from Feb to early March and AFAIK it didn’t have much to do with carriers who were eagerly expecting it. It was later delayed from early to second-half of March because of the issues faced with Samsung handsets and the 7008 update. Once again it had nothing to do with carriers. The decision to delay it the second time was IMO a wise decision and shows that MS is trying to do its best to get this right. Now, this could have been avoided if the MS and Samsung actually took the time to test the whole process on the Focus and Omnia 7 before hand..but this is history.

No, what’s frustrating many people (me included) is that Windows Phone 7 is being publicly handled by Microsoft in a totally amateurish way. The PR suck, the marketing sucks and the communication sucks. When I make a post (with video proof) about the fact that the camera settings are still not saved in NoDo  the worst that MS can do is tell us that it’s a “feature” and that it’s the best solution for the end-user experience, even though every single review and nearly all users have complained about it. Unfortunately that’s what they did and this is only one example. I have posted countless times about the Super-AMOLED color banding issues because of the lack of dithering in 90% of the OS. Sadly, MS never bothered to come forward on this issue. Most of the other complains are mainly focused around the lack of APIs and sub-par SL controls but those are things that only directly affect developers. MIX11 is just around the corner and I’m fairly sure that we will hear some good news regarding these subjects. The last set of complains are related to the international services (Bing and Bing Maps) and unfortunately those things can take a while to evolve (the Nokia partnership will help here).

It has all to do with PR, marketing and communication. Microsoft always sucked at these unless it had something to do with the Xbox brand and this is frankly getting tiring. We are all quick to forget that not long ago Microsoft came out with something called Windows Mobile 6.5 and tried to sell it as the best thing since sliced bread…. I don’t care if the Marketplace has 10K apps especially when most of them are crap. What people want is to see is Windows Phone 7 being treated like first class citizen and not a homeless bumm. Oh..and a clear roadmap!

Here’s Joe’s post:

Many of you are making critical comments here which are certainly fair. First, I was wrong when I said “most people have received the February update.” There are many of you who have yet to receive it, and I don’t blame you for speaking up and pointing out my mistake. Second, I referred to our updates as “complete” because I was thinking of the internal process where we pass completed software to another group who delivers them – but of course no update is complete until you all have it. Plus, at the time I did the interview we had started the NoDo (“march update”) delivery process and I knew “it was going well” from our perspective: people were officially getting it, the success rate of its deployment on real-world phones was looking good, and we were happy that the process had STARTED well. Still—these are NOT the same as all of you getting it and I’m sorry that I came across as insensitive to that fact.

I am a very, very big advocate for all our end-users and developers, and it bothers me a lot if I sounded out of touch. I wasn’t as prepared for this interview as I should have been—I walked into the studio with an informal state of mind, thinking about MIX and what we WILL be talking about, and I didn’t have the right up-to-date information to give a good explanation on updates which I know to be a very high-interest topic right now.

I have read all of the comments here (and many of them on the other blogs) and so has pretty much everyone in our management team. We know it’s been frustrating to wait for features/fixes and (probably worse) to hear little from us on specific dates. We are sorry the process has been rocky. The “where’s my phone update” table is our first step to try to remedy this in the face of technical problems that have made our first wave of updates take longer than we expected. We know the table would benefit greatly from more detail, and we are hoping to add more to it by working with the Operators who own the “testing” phase to get more clarity. If your phone is shown in “scheduling”, it’ll be worth checking the table next week.

In the spirit of “MIX as a conversation” – I will make sure that when I show up in Vegas that I’m well prepared to give an update in person and to try to answer your questions as best I can. You folks are obviously a very important audience for us and it’s right for you to expect us to communicate and execute better. I know at this point it’s our actions that matter… The main thing we are trying to do is to get the updates out to everyone in a way that is reliable and works, and then make our process better and more transparent in the future.

Thanks,
Joe