Windows Phone Thoughts: WM Team Blog: "Dogfood Doesn't Always Taste Good"

"A while back someone asked which phones the Windows Mobile team uses. While I will end up answering that question, in typical form, I’m going to be really verbose about it. In Windows Mobile, we’re very strong proponents of what we call, 'Eating our own dogfood.' What this means is that we use the code we’re developing on our primary phones. If you’ve ever been on a 'Beta test,' you know that beta code isn’t always very stable or bug free. Well, we frequently use builds that aren’t even up to beta quality. When internal people complain about this, my response tends to be, 'They don’t call it dogfood because it tastes good.' We dogfood (it’s a verb too :-) to find bugs. Better it be unstable for us than for you...Microsoft doesn't make phone hardware, so to do actual dogfooding we need to work with our partners to get a device to use."

Mike Calligaro pens an informative post about how Microsoft has to dogfood devices for new versions of Windows Mobile. While I think the amount of work they've done is astounding given the OEM limitations they're placed under, this is one aspect where I think the closed OS model (e.g., Series 60, iPhone, etc.) has a significant advantage: the ability to test a configuration from end-to-end. There are numerous examples of flawed Windows Mobile setups due to poor OEM work, including unstable phone stacks, poor Windows Media Player button mappings, and ridiculously large IE Mobile cache sizes. While I, as a power user, can work around these, Microsoft really needs to work on this for a better experience for the average end-user or business user.