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J. Allard Predicts Disappointment at 360 Launch
Eurogamer has an interview with J. Allard about the 360's imminent launch. Among other things, he admits that some people will be let down by the console supplies when it goes retail in Europe. From the article: "We decided we're going to take a little bit of heat on allocations, frankly, in all the territories rather than take a lot of heat in one or two territories. So, we're not saying Europe comes four months later, we're saying Europe comes now, but with that combining it with the physics properties of the silicon means we're going to have some disappointment in terms of what we can provide to retail and ultimately to the consumers this year, but that's okay, because we want to get the market started. We want to get started on a worldwide basis, we want to do the right thing for gamers, for our publishers and for consumers."
Microsoft, however, seems to know the magic word that keeps developers coming back for more every time the folks up in Redmond decide to sick it to them. It's uncanny. If any other company treated third party developers the way Microsoft does (And I'm talking on all platforms here, Whatever version of Windows you can think of counts), they wouldn't have any developers left.
/.'ers have Microsoft-bashing at every available opportunity, that's just not true. As a games company there is nothing to suggest they treat their developers no worse than the competition, in fact probably a lot better than competitors Sony and Nintendo (who have both spectacularly shafted developers).
As much fun as most
Microsoft make significant effort in providing SDK's and development resources (knowledge bases, code samples, easy to use libraries) to developers, they are also pretty up front about their plans for the console - if you are sceptical compare them to Sony or Nintendo who are being at best very elusive about their consoles, and in Sony's case telling outright lies about it (just as they did with the PS2).
It's true I find Apple's information a lot more useful (probably knowledge base aside, but it's the developer documentation I'm usually most interested in), but at the same time I find Sun's information a lot worse (it's wonderful if all you care about is re-writing all your existing applications in the latest version of Java - otherwise it's enough to make you want to never develop anything that runs on Solaris, on purpose, just to spite them). In this respect MS are not The Great Evil, they are doing a perfectly competent job.
As much as I prefer Mac OS X (or even just any Unix system) for 'Serious Applications', there are a whole bunch of things (games development particularly) that are a lot easier to do on Windows than any other platform due to the libraries, SDK's and documentation provided by the vendor.
In the business world, people buy the platform their application runs on.
That's true for a comparatively small set of specialist software (on the server side, at utilities companies (power/telco/etc), and for things like financial traders) but not for the vast majority of systems, which are traditional (very dull) desktops.
They run Windows because they always have, everybody else does, and MS Office (particularly Outlook) runs on it - and because it also runs a bunch of other applications they also use (be that Sage, Visio, Visual Studio, MS Project, or whatever floats their boat).
It's a collection of reasons, and if one application on it's own stops being available, people will either stop using it and switch, or if it's really vital to their business, they will by a additional systems dedicated to running it only for those that really need it (and either give those people X11 software on their Windows system so they can access it, or just give them a second desktop).
Now application vendors are under the false assumption that if they don't write for Windows, nobody will buy their product.
That's essentially true though, because if they don't write for Windows most there customers will just switch to an alternate product, rather than switch OS on all their systems (because that would require switching all their other applications too, and IT staff with new skill sets and putting up with lost productivity and additional expenditure of switching to a new system).
If their product is the only one in the market - or is regarded as best by a significant margin - they will have the option to survive for a time with a much smaller user base (though this is almost certainly just a long, protracted death as they won't be able to put enough resources into new development to stay competitive in the long run).
That's the best case likely scenario though, if there is reasonable competition then they will simply die very quickly (probably within 5 years) as everyone jumps ship. It's a lot easier to switch a single application vendor than switch all your desktops, your server infrastructure, your IS/IT staff and all your other software.