Developers, developers, developers, developers, developers, developers. Recruiting a ton of them to create a rich app experience for Windows Phone 7 Series is going to be Microsoft's toughest challenge if it wants to get its groove back in the mobile space.

Demonstrated last week, Microsoft's new mobile operating system Windows Phone 7 Series looks elegant and immaculate compared to its predecessors. The OS blends together Xbox Live gaming, Zune multimedia, personal media (photos and videos), social media utilities, productivity tools and third-party apps, which are organized into categories called "Hubs."

Even so, a neatly packed user interface doesn't fully address the fundamental weakness of the previous Windows Mobile OS: a fragmented platform that made coding and selling apps for Windows Mobile a challenge for smaller developers.

In other words, Microsoft has long lacked the sort of widespread, enthusiastic support from independent developers – not just enterprise coders within large organizations – that made the iPhone and its App Store a blockbuster innovation.

"They've been doing such a miserable job for a while now," said Peter Hoddie, CEO of Kinoma, which creates software that makes Windows Mobile easier for users to navigate. "I would be thrilled if they could turn it all around and tell a story that makes sense, but they have a long way to go."

To help address fragmentation, Microsoft said on Feb. 15 that it would be more involved in the hardware design process of its partners' phones running Windows Phone 7 Series. Each Windows Phone 7 Series handset, for example, will include a built-in FM radio tuner and a physical button to access Bing search.

But the question remains whether Microsoft can make Windows Phone 7 Series a compelling platform, giving developers the tools and audience they need.

Microsoft was mum on details about its third-party app development platform at the Mobile World Congress last week in Barcelona, Spain, but developers have already leaked some of the company's plans regarding its third-party development tools, which include Silverlight, Microsoft's cross-platform web application framework, as well as a limited set of native application programming interfaces and managed APIs. (For a more detailed explanation translating nerd speak to normal human talk, see Mary Jo Foley's article on ZDNet.)

Mobile developers polled by Wired.com had mixed reactions (to say the least) about Windows Phone 7 Series' development tools, based on the leaked documents.

Kai Yu, CEO of BeeJive, was pessimistic. He said his independent company, which makes apps for the iPhone and BlackBerry, wrote off Windows Mobile years ago because of "incomplete, half-assed" developer tools and a lack of support from Microsoft, and he doesn't see those problems changing with a new operating system.

"I think it's just royally fucked," Yu said of Microsoft's phone platform. "That place is so big: The tools, the people, it's all so fragmented.... What's the advantage of having these hubs and cool-looking UI? In the end, I don't know if that gives you anything."

On the opposite side, Jim Scheinman, COO of Pageonce, which makes productivity apps for BlackBerry, iPhone, Windows Mobile and Android, said his company was excited about Microsoft's reboot of its phone platform.

"My speculation is that Microsoft has some incredible platforms they can tie all together with the new mobile platform," Scheinman said. "If one developer can write across all the other platforms, that would be easier for us and all the developers.... If you want to attract hundreds of thousands of developers, it would behoove Microsoft to try to make that happen. That would be a very, very exciting opportunity for all of us."

But Hoddie wasn't enthused, either. Regarding the new Windows Phone 7 Series OS, Hoddie said adding Silverlight into the mix wouldn't help much. He explained that similar to Adobe's Flash, Silverlight was a technology made for desktops, and it's bound to cause performance issues when transplanted into mobile devices.

"Silverlight, geez," he said. "Just when you thought it was safe to go back into the water."

Hoddie echoed some of Yu's concerns, complaining about how "horribly" Microsoft treated its mobile developers. For example, Hoddie recounted an incident when one of his apps had a problem with text input on a specific phone running Windows Mobile. When he finally got in touch with Microsoft's support team, Microsoft said it was only responsible if the text-input problem appeared in the Windows Mobile emulator software — and if it didn't, Hoddie would have to contact the Japanese manufacturer directly to address the problem.

Poor developer support? That's strange, because Microsoft understands more than any company how important developers are. (Steve Ballmer made that loud and clear in the video above.) The Windows PC operating system, after all, won the desktop OS war early largely with the help of software developers that made programs only for Windows.

But perhaps the problem for Microsoft is that the definition of "developer" has changed in recent years. Apple's App Store popularized a business platform that made developing software a viable and even sometimes highly lucrative career choice for small, independent coders working in their bedrooms, whose quirky apps have made the iPhone one of the most innovative inventions yet.

By contrast, mobile developers working on Microsoft's Windows Mobile platform have largely been laboring in the bowels of large corporations, creating mobile front ends for enterprise applications like SAP.

Can Microsoft attract the small developers as well, to create another app boom?

Independent developer Dave Castelnuovo, whose iPhone game Pocket God is one of the App Store's all-time top sellers, said he and his peers had no plans to develop for Windows Phone 7 Series. He explained that fragmentation — a complex hardware ecosystem that requires developers to code several versions of one app to sell on one platform for different types of phones — will always be a major problem with Windows phones.

"Fragmentation ends up making development more expensive," Castelnuovo said. "Microsoft is trying to solve some of that by being a little more hands-on.... They all have multitouch and the same three buttons, but the problem is I don't know what kind of other options there are. Is there a camera option? What is the minimum CPU speed or amount of RAM? If you're an independent developer, you'll have to code to the lowest-possible common denominator in order to get to the biggest-possible market."

There are still plenty of questions in the air surrounding Windows Phone 7 Series and its overall mobile strategy. Microsoft declined to comment on the purported leaks about Windows Phone 7 Series' development tools. The company plans to preview its development tools at its MIX developers conference next month. Until then, developers will just have to wait and see.

Photo: Charlie Sorrel/Wired.com

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