Brandon Watson gets snarky with ChevronWP7 updaters

In a rather unpleasant blog post Brandon Watson, Senior Director for Windows Phone, laid down the law on unofficial updaters.

In a post filled with rather threatening and condescending prose, he explained why Windows Phone 7 users who updated their phone using the ChevronWP7 method to NoDO will not receive the May security update for Windows phone 7.

Starting with an “I told you so”, he explained that the Walshie method left phones in an incompletely updated state which meant the Zune software could update to the official NoDo, but the device still had remnants of pre-NoDo, and would always look like this, preventing any further updates.

Brandon them washed his hands of users stranded like this, saying “Due to scheduling of engineering resources, we did not anticipate having to undue (sic) the changes made to phones by these unsupported methods. While we are not ruling out having a fix in the future, for now there is no fix.”

He then goes on to say that the only solution at present out of the mess would be a carrier return, and since carriers would know the error code, would know this was due to user hacking their phone, and may not honour their warranty.

Fortunately the ChevronWP7 team has come up for a fix for their fix, which Brandon said they would officially validate.

The ChevronWP7 team has already tweeted that their solution has been approved:

@ChevronWP7ChevronWP7

Microsoft has approved a fix that Chris Walsh (@ChrisWalshie) created for "Walshed" Windows Phones. More details to come… #wp7 #wp7dev

Brandon ends by saying he feels bad for affected users, but “applaud the team for taking responsibility to do this.”

Of course Microsoft itself did not take any responsibility for the update fiasco which caused users to turn to unofficial channels. The company lured Windows Phone 7 users into buying their product with the promise of frequent and trouble-free updates, and that has been so far from the truth it would stretch from here to the moon.

If updates worked as promised there would not be any Walshied phones, and there would be no arrogant posts by Microsoft either.

Read the full post by Brandon Watson here.