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."

Comments

And...

[MightyMartian]

We'll give you what you need to be successful on #WindowsPhone, incl. free phones, dev tools, and training, etc.

And then in two years we'll deprecate the existing API, change the language specs just enough to break your apps...

Re:Microsoft is really well positioned here

[Dan East]

This is a move on desperation on MS's part. I don't see it as a smart move, because it will be ineffective. First, I doubt there were many "dedicated" WebOS developers, especially for a platform with such a small market. For example, I develop games for iOS and Android jointly, I'm not "dedicated" to any platform. Second, any outfit that is looking to start over from scratch will look at the big, profitable markets. Free hardware is a drop in the bucket. Selling software is what matters, and the WP7 market is pathetic compared to iOS and Android. Finally, everything would have to be rewritten in C#, which is a dead-end as far reaching out to additional (non-MS) platforms. With both Android and iOS developers can use C / C++. 99.99% of my code is shared between Android and iOS. There are literally a hundred or so lines of java and Objective-C for each platform, so I'm very pleased to have one codebase that reaches such a massive amount of mobile users. THAT is what matters.

So to sum it up, hardware, technical support, etc, is not what matters at all here. It's about writing software for large, profitable markets. We're talking about developers for one tiny, insignificant, stagnant platform being lured to another tiny, insignificant, stagnant platform (and I'm referring to hardware market share, growth, etc, not how much money the parent company has to throw around). It's really not even much of a story in the first place in that light.