Windows Phone: The Final Insult (Premium)

I keep thinking that I’m done writing about Windows phone. And then something horrible happens. Again.

No, I’m not talking about the now-infamous New York Post article that described the New York Police Department’s need to scrap 36,000 “useless” Windows phone that they had purchased two years before as part of a $160 million NYPD Mobility Initiative.

See, I had actually decided to simply ignore that story. I didn’t feel that I’d have any positive commentary to add to what is, and should be, a huge embarrassment to both Microsoft and the NYPD. And that writing about it would simply be like poking an open wound.

And then this happened.

Jessica Tisch, the NYPD deputy commissioner of information technology, and the person who was singularly responsible for deciding on Windows phone two years ago—right when Microsoft announced it was abandoning the platform, by the way—actually wrote a retort to the NYPost.

And, my God. Did she blow it.

Now, I understand why she felt the need to respond, though I’ll point out that she references the NYPost article without linking to the publication or its original report. According to the NYPost and its sources, Tisch is “a terror when she doesn’t get her way” and she pushed through the deal despite all the evidence that Windows phone was a non-starter.

But what Tisch neglected to do in her retort to this damning indictment, from what I can see, is what she did when she chose Windows phone in the first place: She didn’t seek any adult supervision, or any other opinions. Frankly, the evidence here suggests that she has terrible decision-making abilities.

Here’s why.

In her retort, Tisch offers up stats that would be true of any smartphone that the NYPD might have chosen: The NYPD used their phones to “respond to 911 calls, run searches, and view flyers of missing or wanted persons.” So nothing specific to Windows phone.

But the damning bit is that Tisch actually details what I think is the real reason that she, and thus the NYPD, chose Windows phone.

It was free.

“The contract entered provided for the smartphones at no cost,” she wrote. “It also allowed for the NYPD to replace the smartphones with devices of our choosing two years later, also at no cost.”

Please read that again. Not only were the initial 36,000 phones free to the NYPD, but so were the replacement phones that would arrive two years later. They were to receive 72,000 free Windows phones. That is why they chose Windows phone.

She offers up other baloney to explain why moving to iPhone somehow makes sense only now—“improvements in Apple controls would allow NYPD to responsibly and cost effectively move our mobility initiative to the Apple platform”—but that’s just track covering. The NYPD saved tons of money by choosing Windows phone; iPhone, by comparison, is expensive. That was the full depth of this decision. It was only about money.

“Our smartphone initiative is 45% under budget,” she brags. “Based on current rate of spending, we expect to stretch what was initially budgeted at two years of spending to more than four years.”

Sorry, Ms. Tisch, but any smartphone would have made your “cops smarter, faster, and more agile [sic] in their response to 911 calls, with [faster] response times.”

For us over here in Redmond-land, your little retort to that admittedly overly-personal attack in the NYPost is just our final Windows phone insult, the final “F you” in a long list of “F yous” that we have sustained over the years. When the NYPD story broke two years ago, I’m sure all the Microsoft-centric blogs out there touted this as evidence that our favorite mobile platform still had life left in it. They were wrong. Windows phone was already dead platform walking.

And now Ms. Tisch has stuck a final fork in that corpse by revealing why she chose Windows phone. Not because it was best. Not because it was cheaper. But because it was free.

Just great.