More Windows Phone 7 Speculation

I’ve just been reading through the CNet Windows 7 FAQ and while it doesn’t add too much more information to the mix (as is to be expected until MIX10) there are a couple of little nuggets in there.

Firstly, it seems to confirm that the old Windows Mobile apps won’t run on Windows Phone 7, something we more or less already knew.

Secondly it says Windows Mobile 6.x will continue to be solved for years to come, or as Microsoft say "it's not as though one line ends as soon as the other begins."

I love this comment from Charlie Kindle in his blog:

We took the feedback we gathered from developers, looked at the full potential of Windows Phone 7 Series and landed on 3 basic goals for the platform we’re delivering;

1. Enable end users to be able to personalize their phone experience through a large library of innovative, compelling, games and applications.
2. Enable developers to profit.
3. Advance the “3 screen plus cloud” vision

The first one is pretty obvious: A key value proposition for Windows Phone is personal. We believe consumers will use games and applications to make their phone experience their own.

(Did you notice we always talk about applications and games? A little factoid I heard today: According eMarketer, the number of people playing games on the phone has more than doubled in recent years;340M people will play games on the phone in 2010 up from 155M in 2007).

But what do we mean by “profit” in the second goal? When we talk with developers we hear them talk about three different “currencies”: making money, learning, and recognition. Some developers are in it for the money. They are either literally being paid to write code or they are writing code with the hope it will generate coin.

Other developers tell us they are interested in advancing their knowledge – love of the game. They love learning about computers, programming, games, social connections, etc… So they build software to learn. They profit by being smarter.

Other developers are clearly motivated by pride. Maybe there’s a bit of money and learning involved, but to these developers being noticed or recognized as doing wickedly epic sh*t is top of the list for how they measure profit.

Nice.

From reading a variety of other blogs from the team and developers it seems almost certain that the main UI is indeed based on Silverlight, which is the brother to WPF, so I’m hoping these two technologies will merge over time after all (as opposed to being against this in an earlier post), or at least the line between the two blur significantly. That looks like it’s where we’re going.

With that in mind, I’m off to download the XNA Game Studio to have a play before something better is launched (I’m taking a wild guess here) next week.