Microsoft’s future plans concerning updates for its Windows Phone platform, which were expected but not previously confirmed, have been quite explicitly revealed by a job posting by the company. The posting, which was quickly noticed by the media, gives an outline for the company’s update policy for the operating system, which involves rolling out one major update every year and a number of minor updates throughout the year.
The position which the job posting advertised is that for the role of a Program Manager, who will drive the development of the minor updates. In light of the much publicized Windows Phone Mango update which is due this fall, almost after a year of the release of the platform, this official acknowledgement of the update policy hasn’t come as much of a surprise. However, the surprise lay in the manner in which the details were made public.
Even as the company had earlier always talked about releasing updates on a regular basis, they never quite made it clear precisely how regular they will be. Windows Phone 7 has already been updated three times in just the first eight months since its release; however it was only the NoDo, also called the copy-paste update, which actually provided users with a new feature. It has now been confirmed by the job listing statement that the pattern which we saw in the first year of the platform’s existence will be repeated.
As Windows Phone is much behind Android and iOS in terms of a number of important functional aspects, it seems like an obvious strategy by Microsoft to send out more regular updates in order to fill its functional deficits and bring improvement to the users. It is worth noting that Apple too has a similar update schedule for iOS; however there is a huge difference between iOS and Windows Phone 7 in this regard as iOS gets more of the smaller updates, which are also more useful, than what we have seen with the Microsoft platform so far.
There is a large consensus on the point that if Microsoft is to be successful with this strategy, the minor updates have to be improved. Even if Mango is a substantial upgrade, on the line of major iOS updates, Windows Phone 7 has often disappointed with minor updates. This has been one of the major reasons for the wide functional gap between Windows Phone and other successful platforms.
