First let me say, I'm not fond of Microsoft, so my view is tainted. Second there's a lot I agree with in the article. There needs to be a Home OS. It's very difficult to get everything to play nice together and the current MS OS is not quite going to cut it. Also being a HA geek probably makes me blind to a lot of problems from the user view. Even when I respect the WAF it still takes a lot of effort.
Microsoft has a number of problem, sadly they're also the best player to get things done right. Building a simple GUI front end to a user if then else language is right up their ally. One huge issue is that they are being totally unrealistic in the home space. I really don't see Microsoft telling the rest of the home industry to do thing my way and there is no single player in the home space who has that kind of might. They're going to need to learn to play nice in a heterogeneous environment.
One thing that scares me (and the reason I won't buy another Windows phone) is their handling of WinCE. They abandoned early versions (1.0 & 1.1 for example) leaving the consumer with a closed environment that was a dead end (anyone have an HP Palmtop PC?). Even my Pantech Phone died such a death. Half way there and dropped with the trash.
