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Visiting the Windows team with a baseball bat
The Ignored Emails
The Windows Mobile team was building devices years before the iPhone, and those devices needed integration from the Windows team on the other side of the highway. The Windows team ignored their emails and left their bugs untouched. They would not even mark them won't fix.
The Walk Across
So Garry Tan, then 22, and his product manager mentor walked over to the Windows team in person, and the mentor brought a baseball bat. Nobody was going to get roughed up. It was a vague threat, and Tan still has no idea why his mentor brought it.
The P3 Bug
The bug they were chasing was a P3 fix that blocked a thousand of their users. They had spent four hours trying to get it through, with seven levels of management between them and the person who owned it, and that person did not even know they had asked.
Why did Windows Mobile lose to the iPhone?
Windows Mobile descended from the Pocket PC software of 2000, which was built for a stylus and a small desktop-style interface of menus and tiny buttons. The iPhone, announced in January 2007, was designed around a finger and a multi-touch screen. Microsoft replaced Windows Mobile with Windows Phone in 2010, a fresh design whose apps did not carry over from the old system. Microsoft ended support for Windows 10 Mobile in December 2019.
How do teams decide a bug is P3?
Many software teams rank bugs on a scale from P0 to P4, where P0 is an emergency and higher numbers mean less urgent. The rank usually weighs how severe the failure is against how many users hit it and whether a workaround exists. A P3 label commonly puts a bug behind crashes and data loss in the queue. Because every team sets its own scale, the same label can mean different things at different companies.
How does 'won't fix' close a bug?
Bug trackers give each report a status, and 'won't fix' is a resolution that closes it with a decision on record. The label tells the reporter the owner has seen the bug and will not act, so they can look for another route. Without it, a report stays open and unanswered in the queue. Bugzilla, the tracker created for Mozilla in 1998, has long included WONTFIX as a standard resolution.
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