Stop the presses! I’ve got some news. The great team at GDGT is coming to Seattle, and they are having a bit of a party and meetup. There should be a great deal of nerdosity going on there, which is awesome in its own right. This will be further accentuated by the fact that the Windows Phone 7 team will be there to show off some devices.
Under normal circumstances, that would be pretty cool. However, we’re not in the “pretty cool” business here. I think I have made it clear, we are in the epic shit business. Apparently, the nerdosity is expected to flow especially high at this event, and the request was made for the developer platform team for Windows Phone 7 to make an appearance. Challenge thrown down. Challenge accepted. Challenge contorted into something all together different.
Since announcing the email alias to which you can send your device requests (about 2 weeks ago), we’ve been blown away by the response. We’re still making our way through those requests, getting them into a CRM system and assigning them to our field evangelists. That’s a tale of logistical complexity for another day. However, the whole point of having preview devices is to get them into the hands of developers, right? So we have two things to share.
First, if you are a developer in the area, and want to come to the event, bring your laptops with your Windows Phone 7 XAPs. We will have phones on site to which you can deploy your code. You can see it running on a real Windows Phone 7. You get to share it with the crowd. That’s not bad, but certainly not epic. No, no. Epic is in reserve for those true hackers who show up with the goods. For those who have got the best XAPs, we are bringing a couple of phones with us, and some developer agreements to sign. That’s right…the “A” gamers will be walking out with phones on which to continue their coding.
In the last couple of days since Andy’s announcement that all employees would get free Windows Phone 7s, we’ve seen a lot of buzz about the offer, including some around why we were doing it.
So why did we do it? Put simply, we did it for the employees. If you speak to any software developer or hacker, they will tell you that they love writing code. They love solving problems. They love creating things. They love sharing their work with their friends and peers. They love the satisfaction of seeing something work on a screen. Unfortunately, when you work for a company, most of them generally have pretty stringent rules about moonlighting, and the ownership of IP. For software companies, this usually includes code and side projects. Microsoft is no different.
With this new mobile app era upon us, the Windows Phone team felt it important that we enable our own employees to participate. There are so many talented, technical people at Microsoft. It’s not just professional software developers…many Microsofties love coding, and they work on projects in their spare time.
We believe most Microsofties want to write apps for Windows Phone 7. Before last week, and the changes announced in our policies, they couldn’t. They would not have been able to profit from those projects. We made these changes specifically to address the desire of our own employees to express themselves in code in the app marketplace. A funny thing happens when you remove friction and barriers among a group of creative people. I can’t wait to see what they create.
The internal response has been overwhelming. I can’t count the number of languages in which we heard “thank you” while at our global sales summit last week.
The first previews of Windows Phone 7 are starting to hit, and they all feel fair and balanced, which is always appreciated. Engadget certainly goes in depth on their preview, as does PC Mag. However, it was this unboxing video which made me smile the most, if for no other reason than it was the box I designed with the help of a fellow Liverpool Football supporter. He’s really the brains behind the operation. My contribution can be seen at around 2:30 of the video. OK, off to our global sales summit to spend some quality time with our field sales team members, and spread the word on Windows Phone 7.
I cannot believe I have only been working on the Windows Phone 7 team for three months. So much has happened, it feels like a lifetime. What’s been most impressive to me has been the pace of the engineering team. Considering how many technologies from across the company we are bringing to WP7, it’s absolutely amazing what they are doing.
This week, during Andy Lees’s keynote at the Microsoft Worldwide Partner Conference, we announced that the Windows Phone Developer Tools have gone BETA. Beta means that we have a near final version of the tools for building apps and games for Windows Phone 7.
I wanted to share with the community just how excited the developer community has been. As a data guy, I like numbers because they tend not to lie. Since the Mix10 release in March of the first CTP tools (and then the refresh in April), we have seen over 200K downloads of the Windows Phone Developer Tools. That was before we shipped a Beta, and certainly before we had 5M devices in market to fuel demand. At some point we’ll release the Beta download numbers, but based on the number of people registered for the live training course next week (hint: it’s got a comma in it), there’s a lot of people who want to build apps for Windows Phone 7.
For me, that’s a pretty solid indicator of the excitement levels, how much our developer community is anticipating getting involved with WP7, and that it is time to get serious about building apps and games, or building out your business, for Windows Phone 7. The opportunities are plenty, even if you don’t want to build apps. We showed one of our partners, Preemptive Solutions, on stage at WPC showing how they are building analytics tools so that app developers can build better apps. Get creative, and start building. Stay nerdy my friends.
