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Microsoft Pursues WebOS Devs, Offers Free Phones
CWmike writes "Taking advantage of Hewlett-Packard's departure from the tablet and smartphone market, Microsoft has offered webOS developers free phones, tools and training to create apps for Windows Phone 7. Brandon Watson, Microsoft's senior director of Windows Phone 7 development, made the offer on Twitter on Friday, and has been fielding queries ever since. 'To Any Published WebOS Devs: We'll give you what you need to be successful on #WindowsPhone, incl. free phones, dev tools, and training, etc.,' Watson said a day after HP's announcement. Before Friday was out, Watson said he had received more than 500 emails from interested developers, and later, that the count was closing in on 600."
trollface.png
And then in two years we'll deprecate the existing API, change the language specs just enough to break your apps...
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
'll give you what you need to be successful on #WindowsPhone, incl. free phones, dev tools, and training, etc"
Success being, of course, a relative term. I would like to think that developers having their plans broken by WebOS's collapse would make future plans based more on market size and what success on a platform would actually look like rather than free hardware and an emotional outreach. But maybe not; after all, they developed for WebOS to begin with.
Have a free phone? Assuming that there really are no strings attached.
This was a really smart move.
But beyond that, Microsoft is poised to take serious advantage of the current situation:
1) WebOS users would probably desire a very well designed system, and apart from iOS the only system with strong design behind it is WP7.
2) With Google buying a hardware company, Microsoft is well positioned to say "WP7 is the only OS you can use where the OS designer is not competing with you".
3) Nokia WP7 phones starting to come online soon.
There's a very real possibility WP7 could start cutting in to Android marketshare before too long...
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
...I'm willing to bet only 10% or less were legitimate.
"Microsoft Saves WebOS from Extinction" there i fixd thatz for u, it seems much more probable
You could have just downloaded everything you needed for free... The only fee is for listing in the Ovi store.
I never got how you could bounce around on stage like a monkey yelling "developers" and still charge people to develop on your platform.
Slashdot's rate-of-post filter: Preventing you from posting too many great ideas at once.
Microsoft should try to get their hands on the webOS IP as well. WebOS was really cool, and MS could really shake things up in the mobile OS market if they were to start integrating webOS features into their mobile OS. Their growing market share might force Google and Apple to come up with similar features once Windows Phone 7 gets a large user base.
http://ir.comscore.com/releasedetail.cfm?ReleaseID=596854
Only the effectively dead Symbian is keeping Microsoft out of last place in the cellphone market right now.
Free stuff is nice, but developers aren't going to waste their time on a dying platform like Windows Phone 7.
Is the viability of the platform really a marketshare issue or is it really about installed base?
"I like to lick butts!" by MobileTatsu-NJG (#32700246) (Score:5, Informative)
WebOS is the new beOS. A lot of people like it, but never really quite good enough to get mass market share. Then after its death developers spread across different platform and introducing a lot of beOS's goodness across many OS's
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
You have to be really desperate to pick up the devs of a dead platform so that you can succeed.
Nom de dieu de putain de bordel de merde de saloperie de connard d encule de ta mere.
Much as I loathe Microsoft, I think that their platform is one of the front-runners for developers at the moment. As a developer, I would not touch Microsoft even with a 10 foot pole though, mainly because the platform receives more 'bad press coverage' than good at present.
That abysmal WP7 sales are in reality much worse since the market-share numbers are inflated by the older Microsoft Windows Mobile still being sold and not having died off yet.
What an epic failure by Microsoft. 500 million blown on advertising, PR, buying mass amounts of favorible press stories and reviews, paying marketing drones to sit around in webforums to post "I love my WP7 phone!!!!!!!!!", etc.
Gotta love Microsoft's E&D Division. Responsible for:
* The garbage Xbox consoles
* The forgettable Zune
* Kin
* The dead WP7
Why even try to make a good product when you have billions of monopoly profits to blow through and keep your shit product alive in the market?
This is a great call - those developers turned Web OS into the wildly successful platform it is today.
or else!
1000 of them will.
There is clearly more to a standing than marketshare, and this is a decently timed move by M$ to grab developers. They're receiving replies, so some developers seem to be listening. I think that contradicts your blanket statement there.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
since their tools are free already.
I have left slashdot and am now on Soylent News. FUCK YOU DICE.
The market share of WebOS has just gone ballistic. $99 a tablet - genius.
"XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve your problem, use more." - Anonymous Coward
On the other hand, if there's no obligation, might as well get a free phone. ;)
You know that may speak about your abilities moreso than their product.
I once saw a warship made by Mitsubishi get blown up... so I won't buy their cars since they are obviously unsafe.
As with most free offers there are rules (to prevent anyone from taking advantage of the deal) and they are as follows:
- Have an app published in the official application store on other mobile platform before August 22, 2011.
- Port and publish it in Windows Phone Marketplace from August 22, 2011 to December 31, 2011.
- Request your 20,000 ad impressions coupon by sending links to your app on the other platform and Windows Phone platform to info@adduplex.com
While this will help webOS developers get started, the offer is also being extended to Android, iOS, and Blackberry developers. It's nice to see the Windows Phone community offer alternatives to webOS and other developers.
Free stuff is nice, but developers aren't going to waste their time on a dying platform like Windows Phone 7.
Windows Phone is not like Windows Desktop ... I don't like to normally use either, but at least I know they are very different (for the time being...we'll see what Windows 8 does.)
Every time I start to have faith in humanity, I ruin it by driving to work between 7 and 8 am.
You act as if its an Either/Or situation.
The developers that were targeting WebOS were certainly already also targeted Android and iOS.
"His name was James Damore."
It is sign of just what piece of shit Microsoft's online service is when its fanboys have to resort to desperately hyping such a inane bulletpoint to justify their forced 50 dollar a year P2P based online gaming service.
It is just like in the early days of Android where there were one or two completely silly little features iPhones had that suddenly became ESSENTIALY MUST HAVE FEATURES in the pro-Apple press and iPhone fanboys would not shut up about. And then when Android got around to adding them suddenly no one gave a shit about the silly features.
Having to listen to people taking a piss, wives screaming, kids crying, shit music blasting, etc is bad enough from people in the same game as you. Listening to that shit from an entirely different game is nothing 99.9 percent of gamers give a shit about, let alone would ever want.
if these guys have any success http://rootzwiki.com/showthread.php?t=3327
I'm having trouble drawing the correlation between your incompetence as a Windows server admin and the ability of 'Windows' to run on a phone. Windows Server and Windows Phone do not share a common kernel. Also, I'm an admin on dozens of SBS boxes (since 2003, all versions), and I have never, ever witnessed the problem that you've described. The machines are rock-solid stable; only time one fell over was due to a motherboard that shit the bed.
Why do you want Microsoft to give up? If you dislike them and think they will fail, you should encourage them to waste time and resources on this effort. If you like them and want WP to succeed, you'd tell them to go for it. So the only logical conclusion is that YOU LOVE MICROSOFT and are afraid that WP will fail, and perhaps would rather see Microsoft use its treasure pursuing other opportunities -- like continuing to embarrass Linux on the desktop.
As far as I can tell, Microsoft is doing thousands of things well and you are doing nothing well. I guess you are telling Microsoft to give up because, clearly, you already have.
I bought the touchpad on the weekend. I don't really have anything to compare it with, but I don't have any complaints about the UI performance. Some apps don't scroll particularly smoothly, but most do so I think it's an app-specific issue. Reading slashdot works just fine.
I've seen comments that some of the "homebrew" apps can make a significant difference in the apparent speed of the system--among other things the stock WebOS leaves a lot of logging enabled that doesn't need to be.
Note that these two points contradict one another.
Not really. Nokia is still totally a separate company, they obviously got some breaks in licensing or something else to develop WP7 phones - but they are still independent and can only expect limited support from Microsoft.
Plus, any other handset maker declaring complete allegiance to Microsoft could probably expect similarly favorable terms. Rather than being a warning, think of it as looking like a model example of signing on to the franchise.
When Nokia WP7 phones start arriving, and both Nokia and Microsoft are pushing them heavily - I think you'll see some real traction, especially since Microsoft has been diligent at getting many of the higher quality app manufacturers to produce for WP7.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Is the viability of the platform really a marketshare issue or is it really about installed base?
A large install base is necessary, but it is not sufficient. Most users want to be on the platform everyone else uses, because they don't care about the platform. They just want to do something, and the applications that allow you to do that something tend to come to the popular platform first. In a market where changing platforms is expensive, having 51% of the market today makes you much more likely to have 90% of the market in ten years.
How would you define success as it relates to windows phone 7? Apple is successful in making money with iOS and Android is successful in market share and ad revenue for Google. How is wp7 successful?
The soylentnews experiment has been a dismal failure.
'Microsoft' includes WinMo6, which is certainly plummeting (thank god). WP7, though smaller overall, is increasing in share.
Kept out of last place by Symbian? Only in the US. According to this analyst, worldwide WP7 has around 1% smartphone marketshare. Symbians "effectively dead" OS still had around 15% in Q2, outselling WP7 15 to 1.
Not to take away the point of your post of course, but the situation for WP7 seems actually much worse than what your link projects
Yeah, some do, and for vertical markets the apps are of critical importance. But I don't think that most people really care that much about which or how many apps are available for their device.
Instead they buy devices that their friends and family also have, or that are readily available in the area where they live. It is only after making a purchase that they start to care about apps.
I used to live in Silicon Valley. Everybody had iPhones there. I live in Washington state now. Everyone here has Android phones; it is very rare that I see iPhones.
I once lived in Canada. In Atlantic Canada, everyone uses Windows. Mac OS X are practically unheard of. To the best of my knowledge there is not one single Apple authorized dealer in the entire province of Newfoundland. The only Apple dealer in Truro, Nova Scotia works out of his home, with his inventory stacked all over his living room. This because he doesn't do enough business to pay for a storefront. But in Vancouver BC, Macs are everywhere. Such regional differences cannot possibly be explained by the availability of apps for the various platforms.
Request your free CD of my piano music.
WinMo is dying. WP7 is rising. Currently the death of WinMo is faster than the rise of WP7, but that's not actually so surprising to me - WinMo was a mature but outdated platform, and WP7 is new and still somewhat immature (in terms of app store size, APIs, etc.). They're also in totally different niches, though - WP7 is much closer to the iOS style of walled garden (hopefully with a bit more transparency) while WinMo was closer to Android or even Maemo; not open source, but you could write and publish whatever you wanted for it, tweaking the system at almost any level.
As WP7 matures within its niche, it will start picking up users much more quickly. Once WinMo is fully abandoned (not far off now; it's not been popular for years but was holding on at Apple-like marketshare until the last year or so), you won't see the month-to-month percentage decrease because of it. Don't count on WP7 not becoming a major player, either - the app store is growing very quickly (compared to where competitors were at this point in their release cycles, it's doing very well indeed) and the Mango update addresses a lot of the missing feature complaints and SDK limitations.
There's no place I could be, since I've found Serenity...
I would think developers that wanted to or were developing for webOS would be more inclined to focus more on Android over Windows Phone. The WebOS was already on the fringe and Windows 7 for the phone was already at their disposal of choice. So moving from WebOS to Windows is well yucky feeling.
That's a good point. Microsoft should come up with some sort of campaign to win these developers over. They could maybe even include free phones, dev tools, and training, etc.
See this
You cannot see until you are willing to look around.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
How would you define success as it relates to windows phone 7? Apple is successful in making money with iOS and Android is successful in market share and ad revenue for Google. How is wp7 successful?
Some of us are crazy enough to judge a product's success on its quality. In that regard it wipes the floor with iOS and Android.
[People care that] they get the apps they want. WP7 is newer and lagging behind Android and iOS in this regard. Getting more developers will help.
All third-party applications for Windows Phone 7 must be written in verifiably type-safe, Emit-free CIL, which is all that runs under its limited version of the .NET Compact Framework. This means a lot of existing applications will never be ported to Windows Phone 7 because their logic layer is written in a language that does not compile to verifiably type-safe, Emit-free CIL. Standard C++ and Objective-C aren't verifiably type-safe, IronPython and other DLR languages aren't Emit-free, and I've read that several other .NET languages don't have runtime support on Windows Phone 7.
where do you get 65% failure rate from? made it up? or found it on some sony or nintendo or anti-microsoft website? either way, its bollocks. a 65% failure rate would have caused any product ever to have been made to be scrapped.
I believe the 65% failure was in the 1st year of the Xbox console. They would have a failure rate of 70% right out of the factory which is why there were so many failures of consoles sold out of those that made it out the door. They have of course improved since then and I believe that they are of a quality that is on par with their competitors now.
I'm reserving judgement until Netcraft confirms it.
US-UK-Israel: The real Axis of Evil
yeah sure, buddy, whatever you say.
The soylentnews experiment has been a dismal failure.
Microsoft spent the first year to year and a half publicly lying about the RRoD fiasco. They then went through 3-4 hardware revisions each of which was claimed to finally have 'fixed the RRoD problem'.
The average Xbox 360 owner regularly has gone through 3-6 different models because each new model was supposed to finally be 'the good one'.
The Xbox 360 hardware is garbage. It is the result of Microsoft having no internal manufacturing capabilities and being forced to shop around for the cheapest and crappiest companies to put the things together for them. One just has to look at a picture of the Xbox 360's motherboard to see that it looks like something a teenager bought and soldered together from parts at Radio Shack.
I'll just keep writing code for viable platforms like iOS and Android instead of wasting time fiddling around with a flop like wp7 with its whopping 1 percent market share worldwide. In seriousness, why would I spend 1 minute of dev time porting to windows phone when I can use that precious time to write more apps for the successful platforms?
The soylentnews experiment has been a dismal failure.
Subjective opinions do not facts make. Try again?
That wasn't a fact. It was an observation. Try again, indeed. Learn to discern what is being written is more like it. ...so long as you forget that Nokia exists, the same Nokia who has preference over anyone else, including independent devs. And also this requires forgetting Microsoft's entire history.
Nokia only has a slight preference over other vendors. What is to stop Microsoft from making a similar deal with any other vendor who chooses to drop Android?
As for the forgotten history of Microsoft, it's you who seem to have forgotten Microsoft is quite able to achieve victory by any means necessary. Counting them out is dangerous and foolhardy (at least if you are anyone who that would matter to). ...if one wants to count 12 months or more in the future as "soon"...
That was 12 months from MARCH. You may not have noticed, but a number of months have passed since then. And 12 months was a guess, it could be a bit sooner...
By that logic, there's a very real possibility of your having sex with every young woman in the Portland Trailblazers cheerleading squad
The possibility is extremely real you will believe you have given your tenious grasp on what is actually happening down here.
I'll just let time whirl for a bit and show you what is real.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
you know things are bad when you have to trick developers into writing stuff for your platform. it's over for WP7.
Anons need not reply. Questions end with a question mark.
It doesn't matter for Windows 7, it never had marketshare, so it has a miniscule and shrinking installed base.
When in ROME, do as the "Open SORES" romans do", in other words - & GIVE IT AWAY!
Hey, face it: Any/all software oem's do this, & it's NOT a "1st" for Microsoft either guys!
(In fact, go to most ANY academic institution & the student programs for CIS/CSC offer 'freebies' from MS too - just like Open "SORES" has pretty much always been! I know this is the case in the SUNY system @ least in NYState, because I periodically go back for academic training over the decades in fact for it, & got my copy of Win7 64 bit this way!).
* Yes kids: It REALLY works (freebies) - Just ask drug dealers out there for Pete's sake... they're in business to make customers/followers etc./et al, & the game's JUST THE SAME on any front really!
APK
P.S.=> I don't see the "big issue" here, it's merely offering an incentive & it actually shows MS is "fairly confident" in their offerings now for the mobile platform (@ last)...
... apk
How would you define success as it relates to windows phone 7? Apple is successful in making money with iOS and Android is successful in market share and ad revenue for Google. How is wp7 successful?
For a start it is a great phone which can do all the smartphone functions iOS or Android can do. It also has the fastest growth of the recent smartphone app stores for published applications.
Agreed. WimPy7s skills won't even translate to a decent mediocre 9-5 job in the mobile market as most will want iPhone or Android experience. The time you invest in your skills must have near maximum payoff, and it's not in WimPy7s.
Well, it's a fair bit more complicated than that. You wouldn't necessarily want to write for a platform that has 15 apps just like yours, even if there are 20 times as many potential customers. It does sense to target a platform where you'd be unique.
Oops, I actually mean "20 apps just like yours, even if there are 15 times..."
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!
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....
I have no problem with your religion until you decide it's reason to deprive others of the truth.
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.
There's a huge difference between calling an OS dead, and calling it successful. I wouldn't jump between such boolean values. I was just saying, this is a smart move, and it seems to have some traction with the dev community.
I could have phrased my reply better, let me try: Judging the future of an OS based on market share [alone] is only looking at one variable, and doesn't give you very good data to work with. I think we should wait an see how this move to draw more developers turns out, because I don't think we can call it just yet. I hope that makes more sense.
Nice try, but you're going to have to try harder.
I rebutted every point, and gave great reasons why my predictions are likely to occur (hint for predictions: There are no "facts" about how the future will proceed, only evidence as to how it might). I can see you've given up, so it seems like it's not me that has to "try" anything. I have "Done", you have not even "Tried".
I'll let you have the last response, as I see no need to read what you write when you have not even a single counterpoint to offer.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Sure, because there is always another app.... oh wait... not always
..and are you really this self-involved? Oh, thats right,, I found out earlier that you are. You are the Google shill that runs around calling everyone else Microsoft shills whenever they say anything that doesnt support Google.
Is Netflix going to develop another app? No.. they are going to continue to develop the same app, and port it to more platforms. Most applications that people buy (or download free) are exactly like this one. If you want to keep grinding out small profits for low-demand applications thats your business. I guarantee that 1% of some applications profits are many magnitudes more than that meager profits that you are getting with your "grind it out" strategy.
"His name was James Damore."
What? You mean, like Microsoft's previous successful forays into the mobile world??
Um, yes. Possibly you are too young to remember six or so years ago (!?), but Windows Mobile was at the time a VERY successful platform.
The iPhone cratered it, because Microsoft sat on the platform for too long without real improvement and as a software base it totally sucked and could not evolve. But Microsoft has history of prior success in the mobile space and a TON of corporate relationships that, while dusty, could come back to be of use.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Is Netflix going to develop another app? No.. they are going to continue to develop the same app, and port it to more platforms.
Netflix is more than welcome to throw money down the windows phone shithole. They can pay developers to write stuff for a flop platform and lose money on it. I won't.
If you want to keep grinding out small profits for low-demand applications thats your business.
Ha Ha. Observe how the intellectually deficient go straight for the strawman. You are laughable.
..and are you really this self-involved?
Er, I was just giving my perspective, stupid. I'm not an arrogant prick like you that thinks he can speak for all developers.
You are the Google shill
Take off the tin-foil hat. You look ridiculous.
The soylentnews experiment has been a dismal failure.
Come back when your 'strong design' includes loosely-coupled implicit Intents
iOS: Notifications and multiple system generated notifications for a variety of things.
content providers
iOS: system support for generation and consumption of document types.
true background services
iOS supports a subset of such that developers can create, but includes many true background services.
and multiple language support.
What, you mean like C++ or C or C# or Flash?
Yeah, you probably should not bring up multiple language support from a platform that can't even integrate C directly without stepping out into the NDK just to include some snippet of C code.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
I wonder how many devs have asked for a free iPhone or Droid.
U MAD BRO?
You probably mean 8 or so years ago. They were "VERY sucessful" if you define that term by "you can even buy one at a real store, you don't need to order one from the net".
Amazing, you truly have no memory of this?
Windows Mobile was a success by ANY measure just six years ago (really even shorter, the iPhone has only been out four years ago or so and WM was doing well right up until then). Yes you could get them at any store, but they also had a large percentage of the smartphone market. Sure the smartphone market was smaller overall at that point but it was not tiny either. Microsoft had nay active partners, with a lot of people making phones for them. It was going like gangbusters right up until the iPhone came out.
Astounding that someone one Slashdot would not remember this.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
all fanboy talk, use Mango for few days and will see why it has all the chance of getting its share of market. The applications have double the growth of Android even with such a small market shows the interest levels. The Mango phone has the best UI of all smartphones at this moment