UK iPhone

I think this is pretty ironic: Microsoft have announced that they are dropping cut and paste from Windows 7 Phone, the new version of the Windows operating system that runs on mobile phones. The weirdest thing is that they are claiming this is because “users don’t need it”.

This is ironic given the avalanche of negative publicity that Apple got when the original iPhone was launched without this functionality. It was the major charge against the iPhone by every Apple-hater. And even though Apple still sold plenty of iPhones without cut and paste, they did eventually upgrade the iPhone operating system to allow it.

So it’s pretty clear that people do want cut and paste. (I use it a lot.) For Microsoft to say they are dropping it because no-one wants it is stupid. And Microsoft fanboys were the leaders of the charge against the iPhone for not having it.

It’s far more likely that Microsoft, like Apple before it, are finding out that doing cut and paste is pretty difficult to do well. I think Apple’s solution is pretty good, but it’s not perfect: there is a delay while you hold the selection to get the context menu to come up, and sometimes the system doesn’t understand what you are trying to do.

So this is a shame, really, because if Microsoft had come up with a better way to do it, Apple would have been spurred to improve theirs. Windows 7 Phone looks like a very good effort from Microsoft, and it’s a pity that Microsoft are reverting to their bad old ways.

UPDATE: In this interesting take on the reactions to the news, there is this snippet at the end:

As it turns out, the development team actually knows exactly how they will be implementing copy & paste in WP7S but did not believe it could be implemented without affecting the release schedule they’ve committed too and therefore will be including it in an update down the road.

That is much more likely: the tech team can’t do it in time, so the PR team spin that as “no-one wants the feature”. Wonder how they will announce the feature when it is introduced “down the road”…

This entry was posted on Friday, March 19th, 2010 at 9:07 am and is filed under News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.