Windows Phone 8 and Nokia

Microsoft has put another nail in Nokia's coffin with yesterday's Windows 8 announcement. Nokia is being squeezed from both ends of its market: it's low end devices can't compete with Chinese Android smartphones, and it's high end Lumia 900 is equivalent to a mid-range Android phone at best. Microsoft has announced that Windows 8 will not run on current Windows Phone 7 phones (it is too fat for those platforms) so Nokia will have to come up with a new line of much higher end phones that can run Microsoft's new, heavier OS. Those phones will not compete on price with high-end Android and iPhone phones, so Nokia's high end business will go nowhere. Nokia has no mid-range line, other than the now obsolete Windows Phone 7 handsets. And Nokia has just laid off many of the people who were working on a lighter, low-end OS, so they have no low-end platform with which to preserve their low-end business.

With this move Microsoft has finally abandoned the decrepit Wince kernel they had attempted to reskin as Windows Phone. But by dropping a bloated NT kernel into an embedded environment they made their usual mistake of assuming that Moore's law will make up for crap software performance.

Engadget ran almost a dozen brief takes on Window 8 mobile, but to me they read as curiously detached from any awareness of the reality of mobile hardware. These commentators seem to have completely bought into the pointy-headed notion that mobile and desktop platforms are now basically the same and that a unified OS, from kernel to UI, can serve them equally well. Write once, run anywhere is a common mistake that amateur programmers and people removed from actual development on these platforms make, the most recent major failure being Java, which morphed into so many different solutions over the past twenty years that it lost all coherence and became primarily a database language.

Mobile, tablet and desktop are distinct UIs, and require distinct interactive metaphors. Their display, memory, cpu, battery and bandwidth constraints are also distinct, and applications must respect each device's limits. A kernel designed for the ever expanding capabilities of desktop computers will never fit well into the tight confines of a mobile phone. Microsoft's developer support, which is also geared to the ever expanding desktop, will never cultivate developers who can build apps that run well on tablets and phones. They will develop crippled versions of desktop apps, just as Microsoft web development tools encourage web apps that are crippled versions of ancient client server applications.