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What's interesting to me is that Microsoft is following Apple's lead, constraining innovation in WP phones and WinRT mobile devices, while Google has adopted Microsoft's old open approach.

The open approach worked very well last gen, and seems to be working just as well now, with Android covering a huge variety of interesting devices and rapidly growing its market share.

I'm still hoping for a third option to arise to ensure competition, but certainly not the new, closed Microsoft 2.0. Rather, an open option like Android but with a different feature set to cover different use cases. I was rooting for MeeGo until Nokia's insanity hit. Perhaps Jolla will thrive yet; certainly outselling Nokia's weak WP line would be poetic, if unlikely.

It's like all the fun of the home computer wars of the 1980's. :-)

Microsoft is still more open than Apple and the problems they're having have little to do with the open or closed nature of the ecosystem but everything to do with the feeling that Windows Phone 7 was essentially put out there to say to the public, "we're still here and alive" given that rumours have been circulating even before Windows Phone 8 regarding the future of the Windows Phone platform. If I was an OEM, why would I invest a tonne of money in a phone platform running Windows Phone 7 which would essentially be stop gap measure till Windows Phone 8 was ready? Windows Phone 8, Windows RT and Windows 8 are really the starting point to which Microsoft should be evaluated as to whether they'll have success into the future regarding new devices and emerging opportunities.

Personally the biggest deciding factor as to the success or failure is whether they can bring everything together - they've failed to do that in the past but maybe this time with Steven Sinofsky in charge we're seeing a gentler version of Steve Jobs coming forth that is willing to lay out a vision then move heaven and earth to achieve it rather than doing the lazy managerial thing of 'delegating responsibility' to underlings then hoping for the best.

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