10 percent of Windows Phone 7 update installations failed

Microsoft has admitted that things haven't gone very smoothly as far as its first Windows Phone 7 platform update is concerned, with as many as 10% of installations failing to install correctly.

Michael Stroh, writing on the Windows Team Blog, had the following to say:

Contrary to some of the gloomy headlines out there, our preliminary internal data paint a very different picture about update progress:

• 90 percent of people who’ve received an update notification have installed the new software patch successfully. (So when your turn to download it arrives, chances are good this will be a non-event.)
• Of the 10 percent who did experience a problem, nearly half failed for two basic reasons—a bad Internet connection or insufficient computer storage space. Luckily, both are easy to fix.

Putting the gloomy headlines bit aside (I think I might have written a few gloomy ones), Microsoft here admits that 10% of Windows Phone 7 updates failed. That makes a pretty gloomy headline of its own (see above).

10% - That's an awfully big number. In fact, it's a shocking failure rate. Not only that, it's very bad for the brand that 10% of WP7 early adopters have seen errors on the very first update.

Of that 10%, nearly half are down to two very basic issues - dodgy Internet connections and insufficient free space on the computer. This raises a few concerns for me. For example:

• Why doesn't Microsoft's Zune software inform users that there's insufficient disk space before attempting the install?
• How much free disk space does a WP7 update require if so many people are affected by it?
• Doesn't the Zune software feature a download manager to counteract any problems caused by a bad Internet connection?

These failures are so basic that I would have expected the Zune software to anticipate them in advance, and handle them gracefully. If nothing else, this update has proves how fragile the Zune software is when it comes to handling critical updates, and clearly shows that the software needs to be improved significantly before Microsoft starts pushing more updates down to users.

OK, so nearly half of that 10% failure rate is down to two named variables - what about the other half? What are these failures down to? Are these all bricked Samsung's? We don't know. We don't know because Stroh goes on to offer a faux Q&A which only barely touches on the bricked Samsung issue before going on to cover unrelated issues.

Microsoft, you could have, and should have, handled this first update to your flagship mobile platform a lot better. You've already got a lot of catching up to do, so stumbles like this really don't help.

How do you think Microsoft has handled the whole WP7 update issue?