I hope Nokia don't make a complete mess of WM like...

Question

I've had a number of WM devices... mostly PDAs, and a Thuraya satellite phone.
They kind of worked as purely single purpose devices, to run a specific app to do a specific job, but they had certain things in common
1. Useless battery life - 1 to 2 hrs for PDAs, maybe 3-4 hrs with a huge extended battery pack
2. Very buggy operating system. I think it remained buggy over the years because Micro$oft washed their hands of all support. Users could not report bugs to anybody. The support had to come from the OEMs (e.g. Toshiba, HP) and they totally washed their hands of any support too, so in the end there was no channel via which stuff could be fed back. Only the biggest corporate users had a point of contact for support, but their PDAs were all configured by the central sysadmin to be very uniform, so problems were few.
3. Those with a GPS had a rubbish GPS performance, presumably due to interference from the processor etc. I have one of the most recent ones - a Fuji LOOX N560 - which cost about 500 euros but is no exception to the foregoing, and its GPS can take an hour to get a lock if you power it up while driving.
4. The Thuraya phone, SG-2520, is absolute rubbish and only barely usable. The menu is slow, it locks up, the GPS is rubbish. I reviewed it here: http://www.peter2000.co.uk/aviation/satcomms/
I don't think WM is inherently rubbish, but Nokia will need to revisit the OS from bottom up and fix the bugs. They will also need to be very proactive in listening to user reports and fixing the bugs as they are reported - and there will be MANY.

Answer 1

The most important thing is for there to be a feedback channel whereby users can report bugs.
That never existed on WM - all the way from the earliest Compaq PDAs to the last Fuji ones (and then WM basically died).
Nokia is a huge company and they can dictate rules like this. They can get M$ to fix stuff promptly.
For desktop operating systems, M$ used to have reporting emails e.g. ntbug @ microsoft com and I know they used to read them because I had some good responses. But WM never had such a setup.
I don't think WP will be a total rewrite because nobody does that in reality. I have been a hardware and software developer since 1978. You recycle old code to the maximum extent possible, especially if you want compatibility with other devices already out there (bluetooth and wifi come to mind). Look at the huge problems Apple are having with wifi bugs on the Ipad2... they decided to ignore legacy wifi access points and many are incompatible.