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Windows Phone 7 is a new beginning for Microsoft, and at the same time, an ending. The epoch of the “slap our software on any old hardware” open platform is dead.
There’s a spectrum of hardware and software integration. At one end, you have the likes of Apple, RIM and Nintendo who create software and design the hardware that it runs on. It’s controlled and tightly integrated top-to-bottom. At the other end, you have the classic Microsoft model—they just create the software, and a hardware company like Dell or HTC or Joe’s Mom buys a license to install it on their machine, which they sell to you. (FWIW, Microsoft would argue they’re in the middle, with open source, that is, “unstructured openness,” down on the other, wild ‘n’ crazy end.) In the center, you have a mix—there’s still a split between software and hardware, but one side dictates more stringently what’s required of the other side, or they work more closely together, so it’s sorta integrated, but sorta not.
