Not long after Verizon’s confirmation that it would not carry Windows Phone 7 devices this year earlier today, Senior Product Manager Greg Sullivan has confirmed to CNET that Windows Phone 7 is currently GSM-only until the first half of next year due to hardware development timeframe constraints and the compressed launch timeframe for Windows Phone 7 leading to the selection of GSM as the standard of choice due to its ubiquity, while confirming that CDMA-based Windows Phone 7 devices would be available next year.
The relevant quotes from Sullivan follow below with Sullivan also confirming that the decision to omit CDMA support was known internally while reluctant to make public confirmations until Verizon’s comments earlier today:
"For the worldwide market, the vast majority of phones are GSM phones, so we focused on GSM first and then plan to deliver an update that will have great CDMA support in the first half of 2011," "That’s device availability in the first half and we’re very confident of that. That’s probably a conservative estimate." "We had to make some trade-offs, even Microsoft doesn’t have unlimited resources. We had to prioritize doing fewer things, really, really well."
Because of the compressed development timeframe for both the hardware and software other concessions were made as well to ensure that Windows Phone 7 would meet launch targets, such as the initial omission of cut/copy/paste functionality as well as the aforementioned CDMA support.
Windows Phone 7 is really being crippled by missing features like this, caused by the compressed development timeframe.
In the case of missing CDMA ability, it will really crimp the potential market of Windows Phone 7, reducing its small market footprint even further.
This is just more of the norm when it comes to Microsoft development and started with Windows XP / Server 2003 with Bill Gates taking less and less of a role in the day to day operations of the company and its developments and achievements. The example is easy to see when you compare Office 2003 to Office XP and Server 2003 to Windows XP. Vista’s development was doomed to fail since they decided to just lower the bar rather then fix the underlying problem. For 5 years Microsoft really sat on its laurels when it comes to the mobile OS. The changes and features they introduced in each successive version amounted to nothing really more then bug fixes. Each successive version including fewer and fewer features and benefits of the previous version, for example Active Sync and the ability to backup the device completely or a full copy of the latest version of Microsoft Outlook. At this point I think my next phone will be an Android based phone although I am going to wait out Sprint and refuse to pay a $10 a month extortion fee for the privledge to own an Android Phone on the Sprint network.