One of the worst WP7 interviews I've ever read.

Microsoft's Joe Belfiore interviewed by Walt Mossberg. Every aspect of this catastrophe had me rolling my eyes. Joe Belfiore was either dodging questions or being an enormous pushover with no apparent intent to sell the platform. Walt Mossberg wasn't trying to uncover any new information but only asking questions that he (and anyone who has ever seen or read about WP7) already knew the - negative - answer to. And Engadget's liveblog is painting a very biased picture of the whole interview compared to the much more neutral All Things Digital liveblog.

It's a sort of amalgamation of everything that sucks about the industry: corporate mouthpieces, lacklustre support of a new platform, awful journalism and fanboys. I really hope this is a passing trend because if not, the future looks bleak.

And to think I never wanted to be in IT. I wanted to be... a lumberjack.

Joe has a script in his mind and can't deviate from it. Putting him up for an interview is a mistake (should have sent Laura )

And yeh, it's hard to get good reporting, let alone good community comments because everyone seems to have some reason why they want it to suceed or fail before it was even released and now they're sticking to their guns.

yeah, that was pretty disappointing :/ atleast he alluded to copy-paste, but that is old news really.

hopefully more info on the wp7 update will start emerging soon.. mwc is in frickin february, thats eons away

The problem is Walt he doesn't understand what he being told.

"12:04PM Walt: Last night Andy Rubin said you had a lot of old code. Stuff that's been around 20 years... is that true or is it new code?

Joe: Well a lot of it is new. We do have a codebase that is older, but much of what we have is new. Look at Linux, core parts of it are based on Unix, which has been around a long time.

Walt: Does that mean there are old parts of Android?

Joe: I couldn't say that."

He trying imply that WP7 is made from parts of Android.

"12:00PM Walt: Now you have how many speed dials...

Joe: We have 16... no 8... 8 speed dial tiles.

Walt: If I wanted to have 15 speed dial contacts, I couldn't do that."

Well Duh!. I reckont Walt's a 12'o clock flasher.

"Walt: Well I downloaded a weather app, and the tile never updated, just like the iPhone, you have to go in and check it.

This is not a problem with WP7 its a problem that particular application.

Just because that one Application you downloaded doesn't utilise this feature, doesn't automatically equate to it being a fault with the OS. 

Joe said he didn't know.(I believe) Why retry to get definitive figure?

Maybe Joe doesn't know, its patronising just because the Interviewer thinks they know better/otherwise. If the know otherwise then says.

"Walt: One last thing -- I want to talk about craplets. Why are you letting carriers do it? Why can't you stop it?"

Too be fair, Walt is pretty harsh on anyone who doesn't have a fruit as a logo.

Maybe Ballmer can use some chairs if it was him getting interviewed

16 minutes ago, felix9 wrote

Maybe Ballmer can use some chairs if it was him getting interviewed

What is he going to do? I would want to watch it live.

I realize that this is the holiday season and that I should be spreading cheer and crap, but I have to say screw Walt Mossberg and his terrible questions. For someone that has spent as much time dabbling with technology as Moses spent wandering the desert, he hasn't come out the other end any more informed.

Microsoft has and will be a developer company. And, sending out weird looking dudes for public interviews is fine, as long as they can successfully advocate for the developers. I really don't want to work with a crappy development environment. But, that's what I'll be stuck with if Microsoft F's this thing up.

-Josh

p.s. Merry Christmas. Merry Christmas, Merry Christmas, Merry Christmas, kiss my asś. Kiss his asś. Kiss your asś. Happy Hanukkah. 

You're right: it was the worst interview I have ever seen, but that was only partly Mossberg's fault. Let's look at this way; Mossberg's technical expertise is non-existent, which is why he believes having an 'old' kernel is a problem for a new mobile operating system. (I can only assume Walt doesn't realise his beloved iPhone operating system is based on the Mach kernel which has been around for 25 years.) 

Faced with such a dire lack of knowledge, Belfiore should have been able to bury him without breaking sweat. Instead, he basically apologized for WM7's existence: in the space of a few minutes, he single-handedly reduced the WM7 from a smartphone to a dumbphone with widgets! Genius!

However, listening to him, I think I understand a little more about MS's strategy. They know they've missed the boat. Without the Windows desktop to reinforce their marketshare, Microsoft knows that they don't really stand a chance against Google and Apple, so they're trying to carve out a niche for themselves in a market for the 'not-so-dumbphone': not as capable as the competition, but enough for most people to get by. The real advantage (as Belfiore so poorly alluded to) is the price. I have noticed that I can pick up one of these WM7 phones on a two-year contract for a lot less money than an Android or an iPhone. I'm thinking I could get one and have save enough for an iPad!

Which brings me to another point. MS has been plugging at tablets for ten years and made almost no headway. Now along comes the iPad and, not only steals the market from under them, threatens the laptop market too. And MS still thinks the answer is take a desktop operating system and shoehorn it into a completely unsuitable form factor.

Yes, only half that interview was Mossberg's fault.

@Bass: he seemed pretty interested in what Andy Rubin had to say yesterday.

@Ray7: Like I said, it was everything about this interview that was terrible. Both Mossberg's 'questions' and Belfiore's ridiculous answers are to blame. I have no idea what exactly happened there, because Engadget's reporting is far from reliable and ATD's report doesn't seem to feature any direct quotes, but if his first response to "What sets you apart" was really "We have a camera button" and Microsoft isn't seriously reconsidering sending him to future interviews then they managed to trump the WHS team in cluelessness.

He didn't sell any of the platform's strengths and he allowed Mossberg to make him dwell repeatedly on its many weaknesses. Rather than poking holes in Mossberg's flawed reasoning that old code is a bad thing or that a crappy third party app negates the entire platform's reason for existing, he agrees with that line of reasoning, apologizes for it, and then doesn't get much further than "we're not doing all bad..."

Pathetic.

That's one problem...WP7 has a number of weaknesses that make it easy for someone like Mossberg to probe. Actually, old Walt M (back in the day) was quite harsh with his reviews of Apple products; and he doesn't tend to give MS, Apple or anyone else a free ride. But, to discern this, you have to remove your Microsoft (or Apple or Android) fan glasses. The questions asked should be simple to answer.