Windows Phone 7 is a threat to something far more important than Android or iPhone

I disagree w/ the author on the threat that WinPhone7 will present. I think it will be M$ bringing patent suits against Android handset manufacturers & dumping cheap WinPhone7 licenses & vendor exclusivity agreements (like w/ Acer & ASUS) keeping Android & Meego off the mobile form factors.

WinPhone7's browser is only an issue if there is widespread adoption of their phone OS.

Count me in as well.

Microsoft dictating the web - those days are gone. Developers going the extra mile to support IE6 and making sites optimized for IE6 - those days are gone.

Gazillions of web-devs are dumping Flash because of the iPhone, and there was another article on LXer today ~50% of websites has HTML5-enabled web-video.

So Windows Phone 7 will not change the web, in fact because web devs care less and less about Microsoft on phones, it will only work the other way around and limit the number of websites on which Windows phones will work. I'm pretty sure if Windows Phone 7 only has IE7, lots of web-devs will make amok for it not being 'standard compliant'.

Of course, MS may claim it's not ready to adopt HTML5 because patents are not settled in WHATWG working group. But it's not dictating anymore, the only thing they could do is collect some patent license-fees and that's it.