Microsoft promises a major release of Windows Phone every year

Published on 06-13-2011 10:50 PM

Microsoft has promised it will release a major edition of Windows Phone every year.

The promise was revealed in a Microsoft job posting on Monday. Engadget notes that the timeline shouldn’t come as much of a surprise given that iOS and Android both push out major releases months apart. Microsoft’s job posting states the following:

There has never been a more thrilling time for the Windows Phone team! Windows Phone 7 launched and is building momentum in the market. Do you want to be part of driving the next big business for the company? If you believe Windows Phone is a critical area of investment for Microsoft and if you have a passion for creating compelling mobile user experiences then come join the Windows Phone Customer Experience Engineering team (CXE) and help shape the future of mobile. We are passionate about delivering world-class products to our users and partners. We aren’t just building a me-too iPhone or Android competitor; we’re changing the way customers use and experience their device. The Application Platform team is building the new development framework for Windows Phone applications, responsible for defining the application model and delivering the application manager, execution framework, integration with the OS, notifications, data services, integration with cloud services and delivering the ecosystem for supporting mobile application developers.

This Senior Program Manager position will be the CXE Feature PM that drives all development work on the Application Platform for update releases between major yearly releases. You will work closely with the Application Platform team who is working on major yearly releases and with the best technologies/teams across the company (e.g. Silverlight, XNA, .NET Compact Framework). We believe leveraging our partners, combined with building phone specific technologies within our own engineering team, results in leveraging the best technology from Microsoft for our developers.

Microsoft is currently on track to release Windows Phone Mango in the fall. The software giant unveiled a number of new Windows Phone Mango features last month. Mango will include over 500 new features ranging from multitasking through to some major Bing search improvements.

Categories:
Software,
Hardware

6 Comments

icerush - 06-14-2011, 12:50 AM
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well that's, um, annoying. that means you could buy a $500 piece of hardware with a 2 year agreement and by the end be 2 operating systems behind. typical micro$oft. and apple. and i guess google.

Hologram - 06-14-2011, 01:07 PM
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Not really surprised about this when it comes to corporations like Microsoft.

Rart - 06-15-2011, 02:02 AM
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That doesn't mean your phone is "outdated". This is simply an OS update. Your existing phone will get the new update when it comes out.

Regardless, anyone who expects hardware to still be relevant in two years is kidding themselves.

icerush - 06-15-2011, 03:38 AM
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when i buy the nicest phone available at the time, i'm buying it to last. and i've had sprint, alltel and verizon smartphones in recent years and none of them were very good about releasing software updates. and smartphones two years ago were only a step or two behind the features in use today (3G, WiFi, 500Mhz+ processors, 256mb RAM, etc), so i dont see how they are no longer "relevant". to be fair, I think in the past few years the service providers have stepped back from forcing their own software revisions and giving the responsibility back to the OEM.

duke0102 - 06-15-2011, 08:35 AM
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If the company's didn't release a new version or major update then no-body want to by the new phones that come out. Nothing new and nothing different to what everyone else does.

Rart - 06-16-2011, 04:08 PM
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Originally Posted by icerush

when i buy the nicest phone available at the time, i'm buying it to last. and i've had sprint, alltel and verizon smartphones in recent years and none of them were very good about releasing software updates. and smartphones two years ago were only a step or two behind the features in use today (3G, WiFi, 500Mhz+ processors, 256mb RAM, etc), so i dont see how they are no longer "relevant". to be fair, I think in the past few years the service providers have stepped back from forcing their own software revisions and giving the responsibility back to the OEM.

You yourself were the one complaining about outdated phones after two years, not me. I just countered that point by saying that anyone who expects to have a "modern" phone after two years in such a rapidly growing industry is kidding themselves.

And yes, pushing phone updates has mostly been the responsibility of the OEM. Android has been having issues with fragmentation and Google has recently taken a stand against that by making OEM's promise to have updates for at least 18 months after the phone's release. Microsoft has already promised that all existing phones will get the Mango update, and I'm assuming this will remain constant for all other OSs due to Microsoft's heavily controlled ecosystem (most WP7 are identical except for screen and design), until the hardware is no longer powerful enough to support the OS. I don't think outdated software will be an issue.