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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."
'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.
Then in 10 years they'll dump it altogether for the next new thing and WP devs will be shocked, SHOCKED that the career they built around developing in a proprietary language for a walled-garden platform is going into the shitter.
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
This must mean you're the one person in 18 million who actually thinks Microsoft is going to make any significant penetration in the mobile market.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
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.
Someone appears to have obtained some more common sense over at MS and the basic dev tools including the IDE are free nowadays.
See? It even comes with Expression Blend. http://www.microsoft.com/visualstudio/en-us/products/2010-editions/windows-phone-developer-tools
10 years is a long time. Learning a new language really isn't that hard, especially today. It it were for that kind of thinking we would still be using punch cards with everything.
This is a great call - those developers turned Web OS into the wildly successful platform it is today.
or else!
Yes, Microsoft, the company that breaks compatiblity with its products all the time... *facepalm*.
I think you're thinking of Apple, and even they don't do it that much. I love FUD though.
The price is always right if someone else is paying.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
and apart from iOS the only system with strong design behind it is WP7.
I see you are impressed by cheap ui parlor tricks. Fortunately, some people aren't.
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".
And the OEMs will see through the smokescreen. The MicroNokia partnership does not a fair windows phone playing field make.
3) Nokia WP7 phones starting to come online soon.
I have yet to hear one single person in real life say they give a shit about Nokia windows phones. This fiction that Nokia is going to save windows phone is pure fanboy talking point. If people were that wedded to Nokia, their market share wouldn't be in the gutter now.
There's a very real possibility WP7 could start cutting in to Android marketshare before too long...
based on what? This nonsense you've posted? Ha!
Android has never been in a better position than it is in right now. The OEMs know google is serious with 25,000 patents, 600,000 activations daily, steadily climbing market share. You need to wake up, man.
The soylentnews experiment has been a dismal failure.
And then in two years we'll deprecate the existing API, change the language specs just enough to break your apps...
How was this comment modded insightful? If anything that Microsoft is criticized for is usually the opposite of what you claim. This is the first time I've ever heard complaints that Microsoft changes their API too frequently.
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
Like iOS -- $99 a year to get your apps published.
(PalmOS had 60,000+ apps and was ocnsidered far superior to PocketPC in speed and elegance, but it died because Palm couldn't keep up with flashy and the OS was creaky).
Palm had more problems than that. Palm had long been an ineptly-managed company where one hand (some pun intended) never knew nor cared what the other was doing. In the late 90s, the founders quit and formed Handspring to compete directly with Palm -- that should tell you how long things have been fishy. Eventually Palm bought Handspring back and merged it with its own hardware division, but by that time Palm had split off its software division into its own company, for reasons that doubtless must have looked good on paper but didn't seem to make much sense in the real world. The software division was busy creating a new version of Palm OS that was a little more "flashy," but meanwhile the hardware division, in its infinite wisdom, decided to start putting out Treos running Windows Mobile. The software division reasoned that it didn't have much of a future as an OS licensing company with one major customer when the customer wasn't even committed to its stuff, so it sold itself to a Japanese company. A couple years later, Palm decided it did want the new version of Palm OS after all, so it had to license it from the Japanese company for $40 million -- but never shipped a single device that used it. Instead it started over again from scratch to develop webOS. Then it got bought by HP, and the rest is history.
Palm started out with a really groundbreaking, quality product. Unfortunately its history as a company seems to have peaked right before it was bought by 3Com, and the rest has been sort of a sad joke. The later successes (Treo), can really be attributed to Handspring, which was formed because the founders weren't getting anything accomplished under 3Com.
Breakfast served all day!
You mean it is is in the top three or four?
I find it amusing because Microsoft is in the same boat that it has put every other OS in since the DOS days.
A large number of users have already gone to Android and IOS. They have the most apps and support. Not to mention that a lot of people on Android are fully intwined in the Google ecosystem of gmail, google music, google plus, and so on.
Microsoft now has to so much better than everything else that people will go through the pain of leaving. Today new smartphone users are not the early adopter types so they will go to the platforms that everybody else is on.
A lot of people will compair this to the Xbox but it is very different at least in the US. The hard core gamers will drop a few hundred on getting a second or even third console just to try it out. In the US you are often tied to a carrier for two years and a platform mistake is painful. That and most people do not have buy extra cell phones to try out. A few may have two a work and personal phone but most people have a single phone.
WP7 is just not good enough to make people jump ship.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
Windows 8 still runs older applications though. With Windows Phone 7, Ms dropped support for all the earlier Windows Mobile stuff, dropped support for SQL Mobile, didn't allow any Windows Mobile project to be migrative to Visual Studio 2010 forcing any house with projects for both to stick with 2008 or split across two versions of Visual Studio. Keep in mind, this was the same time as they introduced MVC 3 to Vistual Studio 2010 and were refusing to make a lot of the newer projects for 2008 and this was only explained at the release of Visual Studio 2010 and they refused to comment oh what the plans were for Windows Mobile projects and if they would ever be supported and refused to comment on whether Phone 7 would be getting an enterprise version that Windows Mobile houses could migrate to or give any information to anyone basically working in the rugged market where Windows Mobile was the platform of choice. It was a joke.
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.
Not if you count from the beginning of the project which makes Xbox negative in overall profit. It will be a few years (possibly a decade) before Xbox as a whole is considered profitable.
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
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.
No, the mucking forons hired the CEO of Reebok to run Palm, who promptly declared that Palm's biggest asset is its brand, and hence, all $$ should be poured into marketing, and slashed R&D. That's why there was nothing after Palm Vx for a long time.
That's for sure. I'm fairly well convinced that unless Nokia keeps Symbian, or uses another OS, they are doomed to faik. Nokia's hardware is second-to-none(I've dropped my N900 about 100 times from 4' onto a variety of surfaces, and it keeps working with barely a scratch), yet their software division seems to be going down hill. And *noone* wants WP7.
If MS went the way that made Windows successful - totally open ecosystem, cheap/free tools, apps written for one machine run anywhere, loads of customization is allowed - then maby. But not with WP7 being a locked down imitation of iOS, which can keep that market better than MS ever can.
No Embedded 7 is now gone too: http://www.zdnet.com/blog/microsoft/windows-embedded-handheld-7-slips-off-the-microsoft-roadmap/9005
You need them 1GHz processors now because the last few generations of programmers have forgotten what it means to program closer to the metal, using data structures, O(n), and better algorithms. I see it all the time at <insert some company that makes dvrs>.
Deadlines have pretty much forced the rest to half-ass code in to get it on time, or not risk putting in better code that would rock the "stability" boat. The rest want to use a "managed" language to program, and so there goes all the original speeds on a 16MHz processor even though you still got a signal processor, a GPU, and even dedicated media decoders to help out. Don't get me started on the lack of inlining awareness, or lack of experience using templates to get high-level class abstraction with hand-assembly speeds and size.
It's a very sad state, and probably only Apple runs the tightest efficiency ship.