Aaron Woodman, director of consumer of experiences at Microsoft, provided an in-depth interview with Laptop Magazine about Microsoft’s new mobile OS.

When asked how tiles helped applications, Woodman noted:

To the right of the Start experience is an application list. But I want the most important or most used or the things I care about most up on the Start experience. The difference is that the application list is just a set of general tiles and as you promote them they become live tiles in the Start experience. So they become much more dynamic and have the ability to expose information dynamically and kind of have a heartbeat

We’ll be pretty prescriptive in terms of what extensibilities will be available in which hubs, and that’s true with the live tiles as well, where we actually have prescriptive ways to build a live tile and making that dynamic and bringing information to it. So we’ll expose that pretty broadly, and ISVs wil ultimately get to decide how best to articulate that.

Regarding twitter integration, he said:

We will absolutely support Twitter, and we’re working through the Windows Live team to do that. We actually have a pretty significant advantage in the sense that Windows Live has in most cases private reciprocal agreements with social networking. The point is that Windows Live actually helps us interact with those social networking feeds. And you’ll not only see Facebook and Windows Live but over 70 other feeds at launch. So you’ll see pretty wide integration.

In terms of contact integration where you see a lot of people show up I think that might be limited to your Webmail bases, so Gmail, Yahoo Mail, Hotmail, and your corporate mail like Exchange, and then Facebook and Windows Live. I’m not sure whether we will pull contacts from Twitter or just feeds.

Lastly and most significantly, he was asked how Microsoft intends to prevent being leapfrogged by the other mobile OS’s in the 9 months between announcement and actual release of devices.

Aaron replied:

We talk a lot about this internally. We will continue to see competitors march. We’re announcing early so that we can motivate and move the developer story forward and be ready at GA (general availability) for a powerful experience for end users with applications. And that’s an important part of the strategy. In a perfect world we’d launch with all of our partners including ISVs at GA and no one would know about it, but I don’t think that’s reasonable.

The second thing I would say is that we feel very good about our long-term differentiation. I think we have a very unique perspective about how to build a phone around putting end users and building the user experience around the task rather than just access to applications. And the result is a very different look and feel. But those are very, very deep principles. Additionally, we’re bringing to market a set of services and integration that is not easily copied. That’s something that we’ll be able to defend over a long period of time. And if you look at Xbox Live as an example there is nobody else that has an Xbox Live in their back pocket that they haven’t brought to market. That sort of differentiation is something that is going to sustain us over a long period of time

Read the full interview, which contains many more interesting questions and answers, here.

Thanks MobilePaddy for the tip.

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About Surur

Site Admin and Windows Phone enthusiast, he has been using Windows Mobile devices since before they were called PocketPC’s. He is currently sporting a HTC 7 Trophy.

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