Microsoft’s stance is one that’s been well-established by another company, and it revolves around broad experience. From a blogger roundtable at Mix today:
How do you trade-off battery life at the same time? As soon as you allow arbitrary apps to do things in the background, it can run out the battery pretty quickly.
In pointing out that background apps can drain your battery, Guthrie is right. Microsoft is taking a conservative approach in taking away the very option – the “hand grenade” – that is multitasking, in service of a smooth, predictable user experience on the whole. And yeah, for current smartphone platforms that do support multitasking, nobody’s come up with a truly user-friendly way to manage the apps – Android’s implementation is confusing to a lot of people, and Palm’s simpler system still causes slowdown, if left unchecked.
But let’s rewind for a second. Apple, instead of coming up with a true solution for the multitasking problem, built a push notification service in its place, announced in 2008. From their website:
The Apple Push Notification service is designed with the mobility needs of iPhone and iPod touch users in mind. Most of the heavy lifting is handled between your servers and ours, so there’s less impact on battery life and performance than there would be if you ran the app in the background.
At the time, this was panned as a cheap workaround. Now, Microsoft says it’s planning almost the exact same thing. Apple’s workaround has worked well enough for them, but it’s been over a year and a half since their push notification announcement, which implicitly conceded that simple singletasking just isn’t good enough. It still isn’t, and push notifications are still going to be seen as a workaround.
Oh, and this video. This video!
What did that ever really mean? Aside from hubs – which are essentially widgets – I’m having trouble finding serious differences between Apple and Microsoft’s philosophy here. [Mix 2010]
matt
Wednesday, March 17, 2010 at 12:53 PMwow, seriously, I’m surprised they didn’t put an ‘i’ in front of it’s name. like… why wouldn’t you just keep buying an iphone? oh, and I’m glad it’s ok for programs made by the “god like” Microsoft in-house team to run in the background, but us mere mortals aren’t allowed to. honestly, all the overhead introduced by forcing us to used a high level, managed language like c# is going to be worse for efficiency than allowing multi task.
go and get screwed MS, stop treating developers like babies.
“Android’s implementation is confusing to a lot of people, and Palm’s simpler system still causes slowdown, if left unchecked”
these things could be said about any aspect of the respective companies products…
Dexxie
Wednesday, March 17, 2010 at 4:05 PMAaaaaand I’m gone.
One of my biggest criticisms of the iPhone and it’s ilk, is the lack of Multitasking. Or more precisely, the fact that a big corporation that knows nothing about “me” or “my” needs, is making arbitrary decisions on how I can use my devices.
I’ve got a HTC WinMo phone right now, and I’ve been eyeing off some of the sexy new Android phones.
The Win7 phone piqued my interest, as something new and exciting, but this simple lack of Multitasking has lost it for me.
If I want to listen to music, while I browse a webpage, and have my messaging programme open in the background to switch to when I feel like, I damned well want to be able to do that!