A month ago at Mobile World Congress, Microsoft announced that the Windows Phone 7 copy and paste update, known as “NoDo”, would ship some time in the first half of March. That’s not going to happen now, as the company has formally announced in a blog post that the update is delayed until the second half of the month.

The reason given is so that Microsoft can take a little extra time to ensure that the update “meets [Microsoft's] standards, your standards, and the standards of [Microsoft's] partners.” The statement assured users that the updates scheduled for later this year won’t be impacted by this delay, and that multitasking, Twitter integration, and an Internet Explorer 9-powered browser are all going to ship as expected.

The announcement also outlined the way that updates are signed off, first by the hardware companies, then by the carriers. This is a complex process: Microsoft’s update delivery channel is used not only for software updates for Windows Phone 7 itself, but also for hardware-specific updates such as new drivers or, I believe, the low-level firmware used to control the cellular radio. This is a complexity that a company like Apple doesn’t have—for Apple, all the hardware is its own. On top of that, Microsoft has, regrettably, given carriers the ability to block updates.

What we want is straight-talk — something taking ownership, providing confidence problems have been solved and were isolated. Not PR-laden equivocation

It’s good that Microsoft has finally spoken a little about what’s going on. An official confirmation that there will be delays is better than rumor and innuendo, and the claim that the delays won’t have any impact on future updates is also a little reassuring.But the response to the blog post in both the comments and around the Web has been largely hostile, and it’s not hard to see why.

What we wanted to see was some straight-talking. Something taking ownership of the problems, something to provide confidence that the problems had been solved, something to assure us that these issues were isolated—ultimately, something that would show us that Microsoft would deliver on the promise of its platform. What we got instead was PR-laden equivocation.

A big problem is that the announcement wasn’t really telling us anything we didn’t already know. A statement made on an official French blog said that NoDo would not roll out until the second half of March. The new blog post just makes clear that this is the case across the board.

On top of this, it offers no real explanation either for the past problems or for the new delays. This makes it hard to believe that the future is going to be any better. Though Microsoft has fixed the problems experienced by many owners of Samsung handsets for most users, there are still some who are having trouble installing the initial February update unless they completely wipe their phones, and since that update is a prerequisite for NoDo, those troubles are unlikely to disappear.

The major issue, however, is not so much these details as it is a systemic lack of effective communication.

Microsoft was slow to act in response to the initial Samsung problems, and the news about the delay was similarly circulating for several days before this official confirmation. Microsoft is still treating the OEMs and carriers as if they were its customers.

While they’re the ones Microsoft is dealing with directly, treating them as the customer will kill the platform. The early-adopting end users — the people who actually bought the platform, are buying the applications, and are encouraging their friends and families to follow suit — have to be treated as king. But they’re not, and they’re nothappy.

Microsoft, instead, is covering for its partners. It covered for Yahoo when a Yahoo bug caused sky-high data usage. And it’s still covering.

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