Yesterday's presentation of Windows Phone 7 has left me thoroughly impressed, both with what was demonstrated and with the corporate monstrosity behind it. I don't care that the platform lags two years behind iPhone and Android. I don't care that it lacks copy-and-paste, or multitasking, or that applications reportedly take up to three minutes to load. I don't care there's no Mac client, that I'm under a 2-year contract and that nothing I've seen is more desirable than the iPhone 4 I have and love.
I also don't care that I am interested in WP7 in more or less the same way I was interested in the moribund Google Wave last year, if not quite so wide-eyed and breathless. I apologize for nothing, and I don't believe any of my enthusiasm was misguided, despite how things turned out since then.
I am a whore for anything new that shows real vision.
It doesn't even need to be tremendously innovative; if the thing convinces me that its designers have a concept of the needs, uses and goals of the technology they're building and show that they work toward that concept and resist compromise, my ears go up. Apple has always done this very well by delivering new features and products with confidence and focus. Google's approach was more about throwing pasta at the wall to see what stuck, but they've had fabulously useful successes such as Google Maps and Gmail come out of that.
And Microsoft? Microsoft has always disappointed. They announced features for Windows they never wound up shipping, perhaps never intended to. Office and Windows are stunning pieces of engineering but they're clearly built in chunks by diverse teams that have a hard time harmonizing their output -- they always seem to be a hodgepodge of disconnected user scenarios that are first implemented, and then later polished up to some semblance of consistency. Microsoft products, however impressive the engineering, habitually emerged as a chimera of compromises and reinvented wheels.
Not so with WP7. The presentation showed something that I've rarely seen from Microsoft: commitment. They're defining a user experience for a targeted audience, rather than heaping one compromise on top of another to appease a slew of enterprise customers and carrier whims. By God, they're showing balls.
What, concretely, are they doing that's got Yours F. Truly so interested?
The removal of interface 'chrome', namely the fake gloss and simulated 'real' appearance of user interfaces like iPhone, is a nice notion, and creating an interface that responds in three dimensions by sliding, ducking and flipping should make for an interesting experience. The 'panorama' interface where you swipe left and right for different workspaces in an app, without a master hierarchy (click back to go to the menu, then select a new option) is nicely executed. I'm not fully sold on the titles of these workspaces that are designed not to fit on the screen entirely unless you swipe, but the parallax animation when swiping between spaces gives a rewarding sense of depth and motion.
That's not just eye candy, either. Humans are playful animals; we enjoy interacting with the world around us, no matter how old we are. We're delighted, even if only slightly, whenever we can do something to make something else happen -- especially if the thing that happens is more impressive than the action we initiated it with. While riding the bus as a child I always pleaded with my mother for the privilege of pressing the button, exercising my 9-year-old might to make the bus stop at my whim. In WP7, we tap a tile and it indents, then springs forward to reveal what's behind it like one of those spring-loaded hatches you have to push to open. They've thought about this.
But the bigger deal is the tiles themselves. WP7's home screen isn't about apps like iPhone or widgets like Android, but rather something in between, and that's something where I see real innovation. The core apps can be pinned to the 'start screen' as a little square that not only serves as a convenient shortcut to the app, but also displays useful, up-to-date information about it. Currently this is limited to notifications like the number of waiting messages, or photos of the latest people to update Facebook, but as an interface concept it has tremendous promise. You can already pin a lot of different things to your Start screen, not just apps: contacts, movies -- presumably you'll be able to add web pages too, and documents, and...
They're trying to dissolve the border between the OS and the apps. If it doesn't already, WP7 will likely permit every app to configure what its tile can display, to make the user's customized Start screen a really useful destination. Perhaps their multitasking will follow the pattern of their core apps: deep, ubiquitous and hopefully expansible integration. Apps would not just be their own little environment running on the OS; they could become modular components. Install the Flickr app and gain your friends' galleries under your phone's Pictures hub, or configure it to auto-save your photos to your account. Install Twitter, and the built-in status updating system (which currently supports Facebook and Windows Live) would also update your Twitter. These are fantasy scenarios at the moment, but this does seem to be the direction WP7 is going.
That alone is enough to sit up straight for: a Microsoft product has a direction. Not in vague business terms like leveraging our core synergy to engage the consumer by aligning with enterprise must-haves and adding value to the network through even more goddamn synergy, but far more concrete ones: make it easier and faster to get the information users want when they open their phone, make apps feel more like part of the phone.
iPhone invented the category of the 'app phone', a generational leap beyond the 'smartphones' and 'feature phones' that preceded it. Android successfully copied that model and added 'freedom' and 'openness' in the mix for gits and shiggles. Microsoft is doing something new, and time will tell whether that's a wonderful innovation or a ghastly misstep -- but at least it shows vision and balls and commitment, rare traits in the tech world that make my heart pump.
It may be a dud, and there's already plenty to criticize and doubt. But there's some gleaming innovation here, too, and it's too early to throw the baby out with the dishwater.
Though I may write up a post to follow up this one in which I discuss how ugly that baby is.
Peace.
- Alex F. Vance
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