11.28.10
Gemini version available ♊︎Microsoft’s Vista Phony 7 Jailbroken, Developer Upset
Summary: Another case of Vista Phony 7 [sic] failure and why the lack of applications for the platform is a permanent condition
IT HAS PROVEN hard to sell Vista Phony 7 [sic], which is well behind the competition and has serious security problems. It does not even run many applications because developers realise that developing for it (even with Microsoft incentives) is a total waste of time.
FurnaceBoy says that an “App developer finds out that Windows Mobile can be jailbroken, throws a fit”:
Today (well, yesterday now) was Thanksgiving here in the U.S. In addition to doing my traditional family things (making and eating a large, Turkey-centered dinner), I found some time to pop on to the computer. To my dismay I saw that the #WP7 hashtag on Twitter was filled with news of a program/project called “ChevronWP7” (which presumably has no connection to the U.S. petroleum products company, Chevron Corp. – which has a market cap of $166 billion dollars and whose trademark lawyers may well decide to bury the people behind “ChevronWP7” in lawsuits, something I’d personally be delighted to hear).
“ChevronWP7” is a “jail-breaking” thing (it apparently involves running some code and possibly visiting a website, mucking in your registry and I don’t even know what else… hence calling it a “thing”). The developers of it protest that their motives are noble and have put up a webpage condemning anyone pirating apps and claiming that it can’t be used to pirate anything anyway. They note that they, too, are app developers and just want to help people load things onto their phones that would never pass marketplace certification and are just exploring the hardware blah blah… .
Claudio notes: “The comments are littered with MS astroturfers. Quite funny reading their comments.” Well, that’s what marketing budgets of around half a billion dollars can achieve. █
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twitter said,
November 28, 2010 at 10:36 pm
I suspect this is a cheap advertising stunt, aimed at the DIY crowd but it is brimming with hypocrisy and unintentional humor that backfires right away. Years ago, Microsoft used the same trick with Xbox and I know people who bought them thinking that was a good way to get a cheap computer and cause Microsoft a small loss. I told them at the time that Microsoft would suffer a bigger loss if no one bought Xbox and that they should their money was better spent on hardware that was less hostile. The same logic applies here, except no one thinks Windows Phone is worth owning. People interested in software freedom should look to less hostile, better spec phones from companies like Motorola who don’t pay the Microsoft tax. Everyone else is going to buy a cheap Android or expensive hype phone. Five minutes of consideration from the DIY perspective quickly eliminates Windows Phone from consideration.
The more I think about this, the more typically Microsoft it is. It is sadly amusing but predictable that a person at Microsoft would think that an ancient heraldry and architectural symbol could be owned by an oil company by virtue of advertising, and judicial abuse. It is doubtful that people would confuse a software project with an oil company unless the programmers also appropriate the trademarked logo. This is almost as amusing as the bald faced hypocrisy of Microsoft having complained about the “closed” nature of hype phone only to launch their own, worse model not to mention Microsoft’s use of intentionally confusing terms like “Office Open XML” What’s really funny though, is that no one is going to care. People remember how poorly previous generations of Microsoft phones performed and will go for the alternatives that work well no matter how much money Microsoft wastes on advertisements and hardware give away. That kind of expensive failure is becoming a synonym for Microsoft.