I’m frustrated by people proclaiming the death of WP7. While I’ve only played with the dev phone (Samsung Taylor), what I saw was pretty good for v1.0 (in many ways, it’s a way better experience than iphone 1.0 was, though there were many years in between), and it sounds like the team is sprinting as fast as they can to catch up. I think if they can nail a few more things as well as they nailed the 1.0, then they will do just fine. They are behind. They know it. But that doesn’t mean they’re dead, yet. In the software industry, I think it’s still easier to catch up than to stay ahead. But the things they need to get right are:

• Delivering meaningful upgrades independent of carrier involvement. Apple has define the game here, and Android is trying to match the value (and not doing as well).
• Avoid fragmentation. It sounds like they were pretty set on this from the get go. Lets hope they can keep it up.
• Don’t get distracted by the tablet. Aren’t there a bazillion other people at MS that can worry about that?
• Dev environment. This should be one of MS’s strengths. Make it easy to add your own programs. Make it easy to hack with. And make it easy to write real programs, that have lots of integration points with the core UI.

I really find myself rooting for them, because I don’t see either Apple or Android doing things in a scalable way.