Windows Phone 7 was announced one year ago today at MWC.  By the time the OS was released nine months later, it had only been under primary development for about a year, which was impressive – but this also meant the product was being released in a somewhat incomplete state.

But we were told not to worry – updates to the OS would be swift. Copy-and-paste, for example, was promised within “weeks.”  Multiple updates, some large, some small, would follow.  Add to that wild speculation about massive updates to Windows Phone 7 and users were expecting fast and furious improvements that would make the OS, over a relatively short period, more stable, functional and feature rich, putting it on more equal footing with its rivals.

None of this happened.

It’s been more than three months Windows Phone 7 shipped, and not a single update (minor or otherwise) or bug fix has been released.  The first OS update – which was expected no later than the first days of 2011 – has been pushed back twice, and is now expected to ship in mid-March.  And it’s not exactly a barn burner.  Included in the first update will be limited copy-and-paste, CDMA support (Verizon, Sprint), some Marketplace tweaks, and general under-the-hood improvements.

And Microsoft’s major follow-up update to the OS, code-named Mango, with 3rd party multitasking, IE 9 Mobile, HTML 5, Twitter, SkyDrive, etc., is scheduled for release in “late 2011.”  Yeah.  As in the end of the year.

What gives?

What is keeping Microsoft from moving more quickly on making Windows Phone 7 – which in so many respects is an impressive, fresh take on mobile computing – better?  Is it internal squabbling?  Company bloat?  Carrier kowtowing?  General cluelessness? 

If Microsoft has any hope of catching up to Apple or Google (or even competing with them), there needs to be a total, myopic focus on improving the OS constantly.  Windows Phone 7 can be updated over-the-air (if the updates are small enough), so why aren’t individual improvements being released every few weeks?  Why wait for update bundles?

Should the first substantial update to Windows Phone 7 not show until November or December, as seems to be the case, Microsoft can simply admit defeat.  By then, iOS 5 will likely have shipped, and Google will have released Ice Cream Sandwich, the convergence of Honeycomb for tablets and Android OS for smartphones. 

Microsoft is one of the largest companies in the world with billions of dollars to burn and talent to spare. Inability cannot explain what is happening (or, more aptly, not happening), so there’s obviously a lot going on behind the scenes. 

If Microsoft can’t understand that to survive in the mobile space they must improve rapidly and constantly, Windows Phone 7 will continue to be about as attractive to consumers as a nuclear hand grenade.