Phil is the father of two beautiful girls and is the Dad behind Modern Dad. Before that he spent seven years at the helm of Android Central. Before that he spent a decade in a newsroom of a two-time Pulitzer Prize-finalist newspaper. Before that — well, we don't talk much about those days. Subscribe to the Modern Dad newsletter!
yes, we need more apps on the marketplace. wrongly, the number of apps in a store has become a measuere of success ....and if you'd like to take .NET code to the iphone, check out http://www.monotouch.net
the same mistake AGAIN? im not a PC, im a PC USER!
Exactly what point are you trying to make here? It's a marketing slogan, not literal truth. And Apple started it, so Microsoft is simply picking up the lexicon that's already become standard amongst those who watch these types of ads. It's really silly to pick nits over something like that, as at the end of the day the vast majority of witty ad slogans would need to go out the window for not representing literal truth.
Courting developers is the biggest challenge they're going to face. Despite the (mostly UI/finger-friendliness)complaints about WM, most smartphone platforms really are starting to roughly resemble one another as far as joe user is concerned. They all run apps, they all do email and surf the web well and they all (outside the iPhone) multitask. Apps really are becoming a major differentiator.
What's sad though is that the marketing and management of the iPhone Store is devaluing the overall value of an individual app. Developers seem to be hoping to make up for this lost value in quantity. And Apple's only too glad to have developers tie themselves into their platform and will continue to aggressively market it accordingly.
There's definitely a saturation point when it comes to sheer number of apps in an app store though. Apple can thump its chest all it wants about the sheer volume of apps. But for the most part, the offerings in the much smaller (but rapidly growing) Android store appear to be just as well-rounded and arguably more solid on an app-by-app basis. In fact that same argument is ironically used by my Mac fanboy co-workers when talking about Mac v/s PC desktop apps (i.e., they believe the less numerous, but comparable Mac offerings are usually stronger.) It's funny how the view changes depending on what side of the equation you're on.
Microsoft does not face any challenge what so ever as far as courting developers goes. Windows mobile was, and still is the easiest platform to develop for, and Microsoft has always for many years gone out of its way to give developers the best experience they could ever hope to have. There is no other company on Earth that is more developer focused than Microsoft, so that's not the problem at all.
The problem is that Microsoft needs to make a big splash with winmo. You're not seeing much attention given to applications for windows mobile because there just is no buzz for the platform, so consumers aren't buying windows phones. Until microsoft fixes their marketing efforts and helps sell some devices, which thankfully it looks like they are beginning to, you are not going to see people making as many applications for winmo. Its all a numbers game; the more of a certain OS that gets sold, the more apps you will see for it.
