Both of them?
Who'll do the chair chucking when it makes Vista look like the pinnacle of marketing excellence by comparison?
Microsoft has urged developers to “lead the land grab” by developing Windows 8 apps ASAP. Developer evangelists Nick Hodge and Andrew Coates told the developer-centric keynote at the Australian incarnation of the company's TechEd conference that the time to write Windows 8 apps is now, before civilians get their hands on the …
I think they are more worried about being the phone equivalent of Blackberry.
Their existing cushion of desktop Windows software ought to have ensured that Windows 8 doesn't bomb on the desktop. (Time will tell. It is a truly dreadful interface and (like Vista before it) will alienate squillion of non-geeks who just want to get a job done.)
Microsoft's problem is that there are blow all apps for this shiny new *phone* OS they've dreamt up. It is not helped by their senior management being in denial about the difficulty they face. Land grab? Really, Microsoft? The term "land grab" refers to the *uncontested* colonisation of an *empty* landscape.
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I am sure there will be a lot of touch based games ported from IOS, but Windows 8 (proper os) already has a vast collection of apps. I just can't see why an established windows software development company is going to risk existing revenue and sales by developing a metro tile app and selling it at app store prices. If they price them at desktop levels they will look pretty silly compared to the Android and IOS equivalents.
"Doing so, they argued, will ensure apps are there once the hordes arrived, meaning a better chance of colossal sales."
But sales of what? The apps or Windows 8 as a whole (which also includes the sale of developer subscriptions) ?
Why would you want to pay MS in order to have a presence on their marketplace while you can ship your software free of charge if you continue to target the desktop (which is what most people are still using) ?
Because there simply isn't a marketplace for "pocketmoney" priced apps on the desktop. When was the last time you spent $3 to buy a desktop app?
Nobody really knows if there is actually a market for such apps on the desktop, because the infrastructure to easily charge for them and pay for them hasn't existed up to now. If Microsoft had tried to introduce an App Store before now, there would have been all sorts of claims of anti-trust violations, but now that Apple and Google have made people comfortable with the idea, Microsoft might be able to make a go of it.
The problem, though, is that Apple didn't start with the AppStore, they started with iTunes, and people were used to paying smallish amounts of money to Apple on a regular basis. This has been a problem for Google, because people don't have an existing financial relationship with Google, and they haven't fallen into the habit of paying for apps as easily as iTunes users did. Amazon, users, on the other hand, seem to be more prepared to shell out hard cash for apps, because they've already given Amazon access to their credit cards. Phone Vendors tried unsuccessfully to muscle in on this pitch some years ago, but failed at least in part because users didn't trust them - they were viewed as parasites looking for just another way to dip their grubby hands into our wallets.
Will Microsoft be able to convince most users of Windows to commit to an ongoing financial relationship? XBox users might be used to this, but most Windows users don't have XBox Live accounts. Many homes have a shared family PC - who's going to be responsible for the app-store bills? What proportion of Win8 users will have to sign up for this to make it work?
"ensure apps are there once the hordes arrived, meaning a better chance of colossal sales. First movers, they suggested, will enjoy first mover advantage."
Err... wouldn't it be a good idea then to let more potential app developers get a look at the SDK then?
I've been using Win8 since the first public betas and ... okay, the new desktop stuff is speedier and nice but the Metro (or whatever the hell it's called now) interface on a desktop me (even my touch laptop) is a PoS.
For a tablet, maybe, the tiled interface is nice - certainly looks prettier than the cluttered iOS experience - but for day-to-day sat at my desk using Outlook, Word, Photoshop and Chrome (I'm sure IE is getting better and better but I have extensions in Chrome that I like) ... Metro just gets in the way.
I wish Redmond had decided to split the OS ... same underpinnings maybe but give me a choice of installing a Win7-like experience, the hybrid, or the tablet-centric experience rather than forcing me to live in this jarring mish-mash that I didn't choose.
Interestingly... since making Win8 the primary UI on my WinTel machine ... I've upgraded my Mac BookPro to a new shiny one and use OSX more (though still using Office!)
Time will tell if this was a bold and brilliant move, or if they've just blackburied (see what I did there) themselves
...of the "land grab" for farmsteads in Antarctica. Sure, there will be a couple of optimistic fools who think W8 apps are going to make them wealthy (it won't) and a lot of kids who think they can code the next "Angry Birds" (they can't), but on the whole, I expect *skilled* independent developers to stay away in droves. After all, why would anyone with two working brain cells code apps for a company who is well-known for stealing intellectual property and then squashing the originators? (No, I don't mean Apple this time.)