I honestly have no idea what's going on. Literally, I'm so confused that I'm listening to Crosby, Stills & Nash's "Southern Cross" over and over again, looking for an answer in soft rock harmonies and lyrics like,
"Whatever brought you and me / Cannot be forgotten."
And I'm still befuddled.
Microsoft went on record this week at MIX10 saying that Windows Phone 7 Series won't have cut and paste. And now it's the dreamy guitar interlude again and I'm just lost in a daze.
"And we never failed to fail / It was the easiest thing to do"
What's funny is that I didn't intend to built a WP7S post around lame post-hippie song lyrics. But it's working out kinda well, no?
See, the first lyric and the second lyric both reinforce the idea that Microsoft is really trying to pull an iPhone here, in all kinds of ways both good and bad. To wit:
Microsoft's going for their version of Apple's lock-down approach to mobile hardware/software integration. Since MSFT doesn't actually make hardware, they can't quite go all-in here, but they're coming close: WP7S will only work on a handful of hardware "chasis" designs, apps will only be allowed in two resolutions (WVGA and, later on, HVGA) ...
Multitasking? Nope. Speaking of iPhone, it looks like Microsoft will be saving us from ourselves by not allowing true multitasking on WP7S. Funny, because WinMo 6 supports multitasking. But lots of blowhards (me) kinda hate WinMo 6 at this point. So maybe mono-tasking is the new multitasking, after all? I have no idea. I just know that Android and webOS fans - let alone those die-hard Symbian addicts - make fun of iPhoners to no end over the whole multitasking thing. So it makes ... sense? ... that Microsoft's brand spanking new state-of-the-future-of-the-art OS won't support multitasking. What's great about this is that everyone and their cousin is now betting on iPhone OS 4.0 supporting multitasking when it likely debuts in a few months.
I get that multitasking can lead to severe battery life issues on a cell phone. But when you're planning your big comeback and everyone's talking about how multitasking is so modern and so just-what-I-wanted, how can you justify leaving it out altogether? Add some power management, add some clever UI for reminding users to kill background apps ... add something! Don't just cut it out entirely. Weren't you the ones making fun of iPhone for the past three years for not multitasking? Weren't you?
Appopriately enough, iTunes just shuffled me over to Pink Floyd's "Brain Damage / Eclipse." Seriously.
"The lunatic is on the grass ... Got to keep the loonies on the path"
Cut and paste? Nada. Again, everyone laughed at Apple and their fanboygirls over this one up until iPhone OS 3.0. So now that people are used to being able to do things like copy and paste URLs, confirmation codes, and other text on their smartphones, Microsoft apparently thinks it's de rigeur. Or something. Because they're not supporting it in WP7S. They'll add in some kind of gloss-over tech for detecting addresses and phone numbers, but not tried-and-true copy-and-paste.
"You lock the door and throw away the key / There's someone in my head but it's not me"
So right, Microsoft does the right thing in scrapping their outdated mobile OS in favor of a totally new one that, on first glance, actually looks fresh and cool and worth a look even if it is half a year away from shipping. And they tease everyone at MWC in saying that they'll reveal more about the future of mobile awesomeness at MIX in a month. And now here's MIX and Ballmer and The Boys let loose with all kinds of neato looking apps and Silverlight and an SDK and XNA-based games that share lots of stuff with XBox and look, there's Netflix on a phone! And, OMGPonies! And it's all so awesome, and I can't wait, and, and, and ...
No multitasking.
No cut and paste.
It's like Microsoft took a UI step forward and two Functionality steps back.
"There is no dark side of the moon, really / As a matter of fact, it's all dark"
I'm going to play some more CSN and sit on the floor, shut my eyes, hug my knees to my chest and just rock back and forth until it all goes away. Sigh.
