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Windows Phone 8 SDK — By Appointment Only
mikejuk writes "Developers worried about the changes that might be waiting for them in the new Windows Phone 8 API are going to have to wait even longer to find out. Microsoft has just announced that the SDK will be available soon, but only to the developers it approves. If you already have a published app, then you can apply to be part of the program. The announcement says, 'But I do want to set your expectations that program access will be limited.' The public SDK will be made available 'later this year,' which is behind the timetable that developers were led to expect. As you can imagine, the developer community, judging by the comment stream, is less than happy. What makes this whole development even stranger is that the announcement was made on the day Nokia previewed a range of WP8 devices. The Nokia launch got most of the publicity, so perhaps the idea was that a little negative news wouldn't be noticed. The real question is: why the limited availability?"
Google also limits access to new services and even APIs. Google+ and Gmail were launched this way and the first still doesn't give all developers access to the Google+ apps API and services (you know, games and stuff on the platform).
I think this is right choice from Microsoft. They know what's best for us developers. Hell, they made the best IDE on planet - Visual Studio - too!
Microsoft learned this from Apple i.e by treating their developers like crap.
People are bailing out of Microsoft's development ecosystem quite rapidly at the moment. If you beat 'em with a stick like this, they ain't crawling back this time for the next VS release as they'll have Eclipse down and writing Android apps before you can burp the alphabet.