Brandon
Watson, senior director of Windows Phone development at Microsoft, has left to
take a new job as director of Amazon’s Kindle Cross Platform team.
“The rumors
are true,” Watson wrote in a Twitter posting Feb. 3. “The team is in great
hands. I’ll miss working on #wpdev. I will the community, but won’t be a
stranger.”
In an email to ZDNet’s Mary Jo Foley, he described the
decision to leave as “hard,” adding that “the opportunity placed in front of me
… was too big to pass up.”
Watson’s
departure comes at an auspicious time. Microsoft has launched a renewed push
for Windows Phone, centered on the Mango software update and new devices from
Nokia and other manufacturers. The platform has so far struggled for adoption
in the broader smartphone marketplace, trailing Google, Apple and RIM.
Data from
research firm Nielsen suggests that Microsoft owned 7.3 percent of the U.S.
smartphone market in the third quarter of 2011, down from 9 percent earlier in
the year; much of that decline was due to users abandoning the antiquated
Windows Mobile platform, something that Microsoft executives say they
anticipated.
While
Microsoft regularly declines to provide Windows Phone sales figures, CEO Steve
Ballmer described the platform’s market share as “very small” during a July 11
keynote speech at the company’s Worldwide Partner Conference.
In addition,
rumors have started bubbling about Windows Phone 8. According to the blog Pocketnow.com (and later confirmed in parts
by Paul Thurrott, on his Supersite for Windows), the upcoming platform
will support multicore processors and native BitLocker encryption, and
integrate in many ways with the upcoming Windows 8. (Pocketnow claimed its information came from a Microsoft-produced
video meant for Nokia executives, and hosted by Windows Phone manager Joe
Belfiore.)
Pocketnow
paraphrases Belfiore as saying that Windows Phone 8 will “use many of the same
components of Windows 8” and that areas of heavy overlap include “kernel,
networking stacks, security, and multimedia support.” Developers will
apparently have the ability to reuse massive chunks of code when “porting an
app from desktop to phone.”
In his own
Feb. 2 posting, Thurrott suggested that Windows Phone 8 “will be based on the
Windows 8 kernel and not on Windows CE as are current versions.” Nonetheless,
apps developed for Windows Phone Mango (the current version) will apparently
continue to play well on the upgraded platform.
However
Windows Phone evolves, it’ll have to do so without Watson, who was an energetic
advocate for the platform.
Follow Nicholas Kolakowski on Twitter
Enterprise Mobility News & Reviews 
