I learned this morning that Windows Phone 7 – the smartphone OS that bricks your phone! – is a skin over a bunch of core components from Windows CE. Which if you came in late, is widely regarded as the second most wretched hive of bugs and villainy Microsoft ever shipped.
(Yes, I said “second most”. Even WinCE could not come near matching the epic failitude of Microsoft Bob, which can only be explained by the justified supposition that its product manager was doing the mattress mambo with Bill Gates. She later married him, and Microsoft Bob disappeared down the event horizon of a black hole created by its own suckiness.)
My initial reaction to this news was “Doomed! What on Earth were they thinking?“. On reflection, however, there is an angle from which this way of slapping WP7 together makes a horrifying kind of sense. Not that I now think it’s any less doomed, mind you…but there are perhaps some useful lessons to be learned if we examine this fiasco from the Microsoft point of view.