Critical Masses Technology, Inc.

Dear Microsoft,

I am not an app developer, nor am I a market sage or pundit by any means, but here is what it would take for me to switch to a Windows phone.

I enjoy my aging Android handset. It’s slow, but it does the job. Apps are not as important to me as you’d think but there are some areas that I believe a focus on would help:

Note to folks interviewing for a senior developer position: I see you have been productively working as a consultant for quite some time and you have broad experiential knowledge. I respect that, coming from a similar background, really, I do!

So my current employer is on the migration path away from Notes. As I am no longer involved in Notes development work on a regular basis, this impacts me very slightly, although as a longtime Notes developer, proponent and –subjectively- guru, it does bother me on some level. Critically, I have to say that in design and implementation, there are some obvious issues that affect the user experience negatively. In no particular order:

It seems that Palm and Sprint are losing steam already with the new Palm Pre phone. I WANT a Pre. Not enough to go out and trade in my 2 year old Motorola Q to get one, but I want one. The thing is, I’m unusual. Most folks who buy phones probably don’t want them for the same reason I or -for that matter- my readership does. Multitasking? I care, but I’m a minority in the phone buying public. The question is, why doesn’t Sprint or Palm get that?

I thought I had gotten over the major humps to developing supersecret app, but it turns out that the Lotus Expeditor runtime had one more nasty trick up its sleeve: Expeditor’s runtime’s Java Cryptography Extension provider seems to be missing an algorithm for decrypting SSL communications with Google Apps. Bah! This is what happens when the JVM market fragments.