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We should never bring up that the Symbian Market Place alone had 80k apps.

So like... 1/10th of the number of apps both iOS and Android accrued in shorter time, and already surpassed by WP 7.5?

Face it, development for Symbian was pain and tears. Qt relieved it, but only to an extent. I was around when they were trying to design Qt Mobility APIs around both S60's existing APIs and various Nokia managers with requirement lists apparently thought up in bouts of Powerpoint creativity. It's good luck that most of that shit will die off because nobody in the right mind will want to implement or use it anywhere else.

We should never mention that most of the "Apps" were actually applications as opposed to 90% being frontends for someone's blog or pictures of food and multi-lingual fart apps.

Yeah, let's carefully pick our examples. This passage actually speaks against Symbian: it shows that even a code monkey with little skills can develop and submit an app for a modern mobile OS. But let's lament the old expertocracy, where one could feel special for learning a lot of platform quirks that you must have known in order to make your oh-so-serious application work.

And I see you've been put to your place already by somebody anonymous with a hell of a life.

Ahh yes; a person who posts for Nokia on Slashdot.

I must apologize: I was confused by Slashdot's ever-helpful layout and mistook a neighboring comment of the obligatory AC on a witch hunt for insufficiently anti-Microsoft opinions (the comment he responded to was already modded down, of course), thinking it to be a reply to the thread starter.

We should never bring up that the Symbian Market Place alone had 80k apps.

So like... 1/10th of the number of apps both iOS and Android accrued in shorter time, and already surpassed by WP 7.5?

Face it, development for Symbian was pain and tears. Qt relieved it, but only to an extent. I was around when they were trying to design Qt Mobility APIs around both S60's existing APIs and various Nokia managers with requirement lists apparently thought up in bouts of Powerpoint creativity. It's good luck that most of that shit will die off because nobody in the right mind will want to implement or use it anywhere else.

We should never mention that most of the "Apps" were actually applications as opposed to 90% being frontends for someone's blog or pictures of food and multi-lingual fart apps.

Yeah, let's carefully pick our examples. This passage actually speaks against Symbian: it shows that even a code monkey with little skills can develop and submit an app for a modern mobile OS. But let's lament the old expertocracy, where one could feel special for learning a lot of platform quirks that you must have known in order to make your oh-so-serious application work.

And I see you've been put to your place already by somebody anonymous with a hell of a life.

Ahh yes; a person who posts for Nokia on Slashdot.

I must apologize: I was confused by Slashdot's ever-helpful layout and mistook a neighboring comment of the obligatory AC on a witch hunt for insufficiently anti-Microsoft opinions (the comment he responded to was already modded down, of course), thinking it to be a reply to the thread starter.

Hey, here at Slashdot we are not spoiling a good Nokia bashing submission with boring facts.

Riiight.... Would be terrible to have that. We should never bring up that the Symbian Market Place alone had 80k apps. We would certainly never mention that there were plenty of other places to get apps (e.g. the best SSH apps never made it to the market place at all). We should never mention that most of the "Apps" were actually applications as opposed to 90% being frontends for someone's blog or pictures of food and multi-lingual fart apps. No, it would never do to suggest that a system like that had a more solid eco-system than Windows has on the mobile even though Windows has been there longer than Symbian.

And I see you've been put to your place already by somebody anonymous with a hell of a life.

Ahh yes; a person who posts for Nokia on Slashdot. A person who has sat there in the middle as his own country's main employer is destroyed to save it's American shareholder's investment in Microsoft. A person who has seen the company he works for ripped off; selling it's soul and still ending up displaced by a cheap Chinese clone maker. A person basically working to fuck his own countrymen by taking as much of their lifeblood as possible away from them and sending it to Redmond. That person is trying to intimidate anonymous posters on Slashdot by threatening to accuse them of having a "hell of a life". You think we will go off and commit suicide or something? Do you have a sense of irony?

Hey, here at Slashdot we are not spoiling a good Nokia bashing submission with boring facts.

Riiight.... Would be terrible to have that. We should never bring up that the Symbian Market Place alone had 80k apps. We would certainly never mention that there were plenty of other places to get apps (e.g. the best SSH apps never made it to the market place at all). We should never mention that most of the "Apps" were actually applications as opposed to 90% being frontends for someone's blog or pictures of food and multi-lingual fart apps. No, it would never do to suggest that a system like that had a more solid eco-system than Windows has on the mobile even though Windows has been there longer than Symbian.

And I see you've been put to your place already by somebody anonymous with a hell of a life.

Ahh yes; a person who posts for Nokia on Slashdot. A person who has sat there in the middle as his own country's main employer is destroyed to save it's American shareholder's investment in Microsoft. A person who has seen the company he works for ripped off; selling it's soul and still ending up displaced by a cheap Chinese clone maker. A person basically working to fuck his own countrymen by taking as much of their lifeblood as possible away from them and sending it to Redmond. That person is trying to intimidate anonymous posters on Slashdot by threatening to accuse them of having a "hell of a life". You think we will go off and commit suicide or something? Do you have a sense of irony?

WP7 reportedly has 30,000+ apps, which ones do you miss?

It also has the fastest growth of the recent smartphone app stores for published applications.

90% growth! From 1 MS funded app to 10 in just 6 months could achieve this statistic!

Sure, it could have. However in about 10 months they've actually managed over 28 thousand applications with pretty steady growth.

Android is here, has the buzz, and has the goods to back it. MS no longer has to be "good enough", they have to be compellingly better. They had everything they needed to make it happen, including a decade (yes, a DECADE) to figure it out with WinMo 1 through WinMo 6.x. After all those generations, they still had only a cheesy interface that vaguely resembled Windows 3.1.

They had all the opportunity in the world, and they managed to blow it trying to bring the "PC experience" to mobile devices, despite the market spending 10 years letting them know that they didn't want the "PC experience".

MS will probably have to buy Google to put this genie back in the bottle....

Yup, Microsoft completely missed seeing the touch-first smartphone revolution that Apple created coming their way. So did everyone else. Did they continue to "blow it" by sticking with Windows Mobile? Nope, they went back to the drawing board and created something new that is able to stand with iOS and Android and compete.

Microsoft doesn't have to buy Google, they just need to play a longer game. 12 months is hardly a long time in comparison to the 3-4 year head start Android has - especially in a market where 2 year contracts are common.

Hardly a Microsoft fan, but two seconds of Googling would have gotten you here (or any number of other sources):

http://www.windowsphoneapplist.com/stats/