It even involved building robots, like the one pictured above, to make sure handsets work like you expect them to.

Joe Belfiore, Microsoft's corporate vice president of Windows Phone Program Management. Photo: Mike Kane/Wired.com

“We’re taking responsibility holistically for the product,” Belfiore said. “It’s a very human-centric way of thinking about it. A real person is going to pick up a phone in their hand, choose one, buy it, leave the store, configure it and live with it for two years. That’s determined by the hardware, software, application and services. We’re trying to think about all those parts such that the human experience is great.”

Windows Phone 7 is Microsoft’s complete do-over of a mobile operating system after the earlier Windows Mobile plummeted in market share and popularity in the wake of Apple’s consumer-savvy iPhone and Google’s prolific Android devices.

Referred to as “7? by the engineers developing the OS, the project has been in the works since December 2008, when Microsoft decided to scrap all of its efforts on Windows Mobile 7, which would have been an iteration of the older operating system largely focused on business customers.

At a New York press conference on Monday, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer will announce hardware and carrier partners who will be supporting the operating system when the first Windows Phone 7 smartphones finally ship November. AT&T will be speaking at the event as well, suggesting that the telecom company will be among the initial carriers offering the OS.

In exclusive interviews with Wired.com, Microsoft staff spoke about the radical transformation in mobile strategy that was necessary to make Windows Phone 7 possible. The company had to purchase brand new lab facilities, hire and shuffle around top managers and reorganize its entire design department to rethink mobile.

Belfiore explained that years ago with Windows Mobile, the process was such that a mobile carrier and manufacturer would determine the features they wanted on a phone, and then they’d issue a list of specific instructions to OS makers such as Microsoft. This M.O. led to the creation of Windows Mobile, which has been knocked by critics (and even some of Microsoft’s own designers) for being overloaded with features and unfriendly to users.

“It was trying to put too much functionality in front of the user at one time as it could, and it resulted in an experience that was a little cluttered and overwhelming for taste for a lot of people today.” said Bill Flora, a design director at Microsoft. “It felt computerey.”

However, after Apple introduced the iPhone in 2007, Steve Jobs rewrote the rules of the wireless game. He slyly negotiated an arrangement with AT&T to carry the iPhone without even showing the carrier the phone. As a result, Apple was able to tightly control the design of the iPhone’s OS and hardware to deliver a mobile experience tailored for the customer to enjoy rather than the carrier.

In the aftermath of the iPhone, manufacturers have been racing to deliver competitive smartphones tailored to quality consumer experiences. And Microsoft acknowledges that Windows Phone 7 is benefiting from this paradigm shift.

“The success of the iPhone certainly had an impact on the industry and an impact on us,” Belfiore said. “And we said there were a lot of things we could do to deliver a solution that’s different from the iPhone but have some of its benefits.”

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Authors: Brian X. Chen

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