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How Microsoft Is Wooing College Kids To Write Apps For Windows 8
SquarePixel writes "Bloomberg has an interesting story about Microsoft's efforts to simultaneously woo younger workers and to get more apps into its Windows Store. Quoting: 'Microsoft, the world's largest software maker, designed Windows 8 for touch-screen technology included in the company's first tablet, Surface, and other devices coming this year. To gain share in tablets, a market expected by DisplaySearch to reach $66.4 billion in 2012, Microsoft needs enough apps to challenge the more than 200,000 available for iPad. Using student recruits is one way Microsoft can woo app developers who are used to building programs for mobile phones and tablets, where the company has little and no share, respectively. Luring programmers before graduation is particularly critical for recruitment in the U.S., which lags behind countries such as India and China in its ability to crank out qualified engineers.'"
I haven't noticed before, but MS offers free Visual Studio Express nowadays.. And Visual Studio coupled with XNA sure sounds better than how we had it back in the day. And with MSDN docs available and the whole internet to look and ask help from, it sure must be nice to be a kid learning programming in todays world.
Strange how an article about Microsoft wooing college kids fails to mention technet and dreamspark. VS 2012 and Windows 8 are now on dreamspark for students. Making this stuff available for free is a big boost over Apple, where I have to purchase at least a $500 mac mini to gain access to iOS development tools.