Eagle eyed Mary Jo Foley noticed a small yet significant in the bio page of Andy Lees who is the president of Windows Mobile Division. Apparently, he is now the president of Windows phone division. No, this isn't a separate division, Windows mobile division has been renamed by Windows phone division. In a response, Microsoft spokesperson confirmed the change and more importantly mentioned that " there’s no change in the unit’s responsibilities or charter ".
This doesn't come as a surprise. We are already quite aware that Microsoft wants to get rid of the Windows mobile tagline and move on to Windows Phone, which still needs a lot of work. I have seen plenty of people call WP7 OS as Windows 7 mobile or Windows Mobile 7 and Windows Mobile was such a disaster that Microsoft wants to erase it from people's memory for good. Windows mobile marketplace will stop accepting new applications next month i.e. end of Windows Mobile developer ecosystem, if there was any. Also native cloud based sync services are being discontinued along with Web marketplace for Windows Mobile in coming months (reported here), which will be replaced by Skydrive and Windows Phone web marketplace in coming months. It's clear Windows Phone is the future. Renaming isn't much of a surprise but significant because it's clearly the end of Windows Mobile OS era atleast internally at Microsoft.
This doesn't come as a surprise. We are already quite aware that Microsoft wants to get rid of the Windows mobile tagline and move on to Windows Phone, which still needs a lot of work. I have seen plenty of people call WP7 OS as Windows 7 mobile or Windows Mobile 7 and Windows Mobile was such a disaster that Microsoft wants to erase it from people's memory for good. Windows mobile marketplace will stop accepting new applications next month i.e. end of Windows Mobile developer ecosystem, if there was any. Also native cloud based sync services are being discontinued along with Web marketplace for Windows Mobile in coming months (reported here), which will be replaced by Skydrive and Windows Phone web marketplace in coming months. It's clear Windows Phone is the future. Renaming isn't much of a surprise but significant because it's clearly the end of Windows Mobile OS era atleast internally at Microsoft.
