I think cutting all the legacy is a good move -- start over from scratch. They have the wherewithal to round developer support (and also leverage their Xbox relationships), so cutting baggage is a good idea.
I have a Windows Phone (Lumia 710) besides my iPhone, that I bought two weeks ago. The phone itself was released in Europe in November 2011. And now it's outdated/legacy already?
It breaks trust. How would I know that if I buy a WP 8 phone that it will be supported with upgrades a year down the line?
Depends. No such criticism can be said of Android as an OS, but you could certainly make good arguments directed at the ecosystem in general. The interesting thing here isn't that the upgrade isn't compatible, it's that most people would expect Microsoft to support older systems. It's a break in their character. Maybe a good one? We'll see.
So it is delivering an update for those phones too. Additionally there is a promise to support OTA upgrade of all released devices for 18 months. What android phone has that commitment?
To the best of my knowledge, all pure Android phones have that, plus more in some cases (the Nexus line). Additionally, many of the higher-end ones from other manufacturers likely do as well.
Yes, but majority of users don't care about upgrades. Those who do care ... they usually go custom ROM route. Quite a few of my friends have cyanogenmod roms with newer android versions, since the manufacturer (htc, et al) dropped support for the device.
True from Microsoft's perspective but from a customer's perspective it looks like "Windows for phones" changes radically and entirely incompatibly pretty often.
Edit: On the other hand, most of the current market probably didn't know about Windows Mobile so perhaps that's mostly moot.
We could just as easily say "twice in 2 years, or once every year" since the first WP7 devices shipped in late 2010 and WP8 will be out by end of 2012.
How much legacy is there? It doesn't seem like Windows Phone 7 handsets have been out that long... and my impression wasn't that they were generally extremely low-specced.
Its not entirely a start over from scratch. Every WP7 app will work going forward. I do agree with the move though. Its better than having a bunch of old phones running WP8 with a poor experience.
