Am I tasting "New Coke?"

[Originally posted Aug 24 2010]

I was vacationing in Atlanta the week before last, and I took the kids to the "World of Coca-Cola," essentially a museum chronicling the history of the Coca-Cola company, and the refreshing brown liquid so many of us love. Among the displays was a small area dedicated to the accidental marketing brilliance called "New Coke." For a quick refresher course to those not well versed in soft-drink history, when Coca-Cola, the long leader in soft drinks, saw their market share being eroded by Pepsi Cola, Coke panicked and decided to reformulate Coca-Cola, pulling it from the market and launching "New Coke" amidst a giant marketing campaign after successful market research, consumer taste-tests, etc. New Coke flopped, and taught the world that what they really wanted was the good old Coca-Cola they always knew and loved.

While it was huge commercial failure, the reintroduction of "old Coke", renamed "Coke Classic" reversed the market trend, and Coca-Cola regained their lost market share. "New Coke," still sold alongside Coke Classic, was quietly pulled from the market a couple of years later, to no one's notice or dismay, and faded into obscurity.

I find an odd parallel between "New Coke" and Windows Phone 7. (Stop laughing and hear me out! ) Like Coca-Cola, Microsoft was facing the eroding market share of Windows Mobile, and like Coke, decided "reformulating" the product and replacing it with a new one is the solution. My question is, despite the vastly improved UI and exciting new features, will there be any type of backlash over the missing features WinMo offered, like an addressable file system, removable storage, multitasking, sideloading of music without Zune desktop, or installing apps outside of the Marketplace?

Take the hugely successful iPhone. Apple's "game changer" has actually evolved over the years to become a lot more like the mobile platforms it claimed it different from. "No third-party apps" became "web apps," then third-party installable apps (albeit from a central, controlled app store.) The lack of "unnecessary" and "complicated" niceties like cut-and-paste and multitasking have been added, (even a task manager, despite Steve Jobs once saying that a mobile OS' need for a task manager would be "a sign of failure." Well, enjoy your failure, Steve- double tapping the Home key brings up a task manager in iOS 4 last time I looked!) And while the iPhone still lacks a true File Manager, file sync via iTunes now works a lot like file sync via Activesync did/does, hopefully ending the ridiculous kludges needed before like emailing documents to yourself for access later, or turning your PC into a web server to retrieve apps from it via WiFi through third-party apps.

I'm not in any way suggesting Windows phone 7 will be a marketing failure like New Coke, but I'm wondering if, after we've all taken a big swig of WP7, will we miss the taste of "Windows Mobile Classic" and be asking MS to bring these features of Windows Mobile back, and integrate them into the new OS? Or will it all "just work" and we won't even miss what we're missing?