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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.
I loved losing apps I paid for on Windows Mobile Marketplace.
NEVER AGAIN.
The universtiy my wife works at offers W2k8 for free to its students along with VS.Besides it is better than working at Foxconn.
No good deed goes unpunished.
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.
When I look back at the code I created in college, compared to what I was capable of after a few years of real world development experience... The difference is pretty stark. I understand the get-em-while-they're-young approach, to influence development decisions later in life. But if they're betting the success of their platform on the output of students with limited-to-no real world experience, I fear for the quality of the apps in their store.
Literally all of the apps in the windows 8 store suck terribly. I've tried a good portion of them. I don't see how wooing 200k apps out of people who've never built something significant is going to change this fact. I think this is a way of desensitizing future developers with respect to a walled garden app store and closed platform with proprietary tools. nothing good can come of this. For ref i sit in front of visual studio for 5 hours a day at the moment so I'm not some crazy zealot. Crazy perhaps.
You know, 12 years ago. Not exactly new news. They gave us tons of free development software and tools. It was amazing. Most of it got re-sold on ebay to pay for beer.
You spelled shill wrong.
Gosh I don't know, May 17th when Windows Marketplace closed and shit I paid for was forcibly uninstalled.
When I called MS about it they told me to "just upgrade", so I did, to an Android device.
And by turning machine, I mean wheel.
I saw Microsoft do it in 2001 with .NET, now they attempt to do it again. It's not a shortage of languages or toolkits. This is about platform lock-in as always. I can understand if PC programming (native apps) and Web apps don't get unified to the vastly different architectures (monolithic PC vs Client/server) , but in this day and age, what is going on?
Why can't I just import the Win8 libraries into Python? Or Java, or .NET (C#)? Or Qt's QML? HTML5 is not a save-all, and I'm ok with that, but why won't we make it easier on each other and admit the emperor is just wearing different clothes. Why for that matter won't WP7 apps run on WP8?
There was a time when MS has tweaks for every program and backwards compatibly was preserved, but those days are long gone. To keep their market share, they have to keep everyone upgrading into the Microsoft corner, fracturing the market place, which sets us back.
Slashdot's rate-of-post filter: Preventing you from posting too many great ideas at once.
How much of Apple's App Store success is brought about by the development tools and niceness of Object-oriented programming / interface design?
I'm biased, since for a long while a NeXT Cube was my primary machine (and for a while, I had access to machines running Windows, Mac OS and NeXTstep all w/ similar processor and memory specs), but some of the nicest applications I've ever used began on NeXTstep, and pretty much all the apps I have a real fondness for were heavily influenced by OO-environments (FutureWave Smartsketch which became Flash, but started on Go Corp.'s PenPoint):
- Altsys Virtusoso (which became FreeHand v4)
- TeXview.app (TeXshop.app was inspired by it)
- Lotus Improv
- Mail.app
- TouchType.app
- a bunch of other apps / utilities which no longer exist / are remembered
- Doom (okay, I'm reaching, but it was initially developed on NeXTstep)
Would there be as many IOS apps if XCode didn't benefit from decades of NeXT/OPENSTEP development and user-interface design work?
William
Sphinx of black quartz, judge my vow.
God, aren't scare quotes enough for you people? Do I have to actively denigrate people I'm not certain of the motivations of?
In college maybe 80% of the time was spent writing code and 20% in design, testing, fixing bugs, archiving, documentation and sales. In the real world this ratio is reversed. Especially when you count team members whose main duties are non-coding.
Letting those folks frame the discussion means letting them win.
Call a spade(shovel) a spade(shovel).
But that's the concern. I have a thing I can barely see the outline of, and it might just well be a rake. Do you really insist I call a rake a spade(ethnic stereotype)?
If you read the Microsoft metro app store policy you will start laughing, especially at "3.2 Your app must not stop responding, end unexpectedly, or contain programming errors", I mean look who's freaking talking here. Windows 1 to Windows 7, office 1 to office 2010, all had and have freaking issues(freezing, crashes, bugs, glitches) xbox 360 hardware failure, and yet they got the balls to tell you not to fuck it up. Shit, how many freaking times my windows 7 kept freezing because i did not set the storage(both winodws & amd SB drivers sucked) configuration from ide compatibility to ahci in the bios while the linux distros had no issues with this.
Microsoft also has the right to cancel your account and wipe all your apps off from the store any time if they think you are not conforming to their policy. For students, learning c & c++ would make it easier for them to adapt other languages much quicker. Writing efficient and inventive Algorithm's is the most important aspect of any programming language.
Liar! You must be an anti-microsoft shill. I know because nobody ever bought anything from the Windows Marketplace!
You made the point for me... I have a lot of engineers working from India and the quality of work and experience varies greatly. We get them early, break them in, and when they finally know a bit of what they are doing they leave for something else. Then we're back to the pool fresh from school. It's no different than the US market ten years ago when companies here actually hired people out of school and took the time to train them up. But, now every CIO seems to think they can just "buy" the labor they need when they need it figuring someone else will have trained up folks in the market.
lags behind countries such as India and China in its ability to crank out qualified engineers
Uh... what? This is the first time I've read or heard that statement. Sure, India and China crank out more kids who know how to code Hello World, but they most certainly don't crank out more Engineers, let alone qualified Engineers. I've met plenty of brilliant qualified Engineers from India and China, but they are drowning in a sea of incompetent countrymen-colleagues.
Well yeah, it's used by Netflix, and um... well no, the iPad doesn't use it, nor do any of the dedicated hardware devices that support Netflix but. ah...
Sliverlight rules!
*runs away*
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Spade is not an ethnic stereotype in that saying. It predates the english language.
When I was 13/14 and used win9x and wanted to learn to program, there was no visual studio express at all. Only paid tools costing hundreds of dollars.
So you know what I did?
Switched to Linux.
Even today, I have no idea how to write a Windows program (managed to write a DLL I needed a few years ago though.. using Visual studio express C++).. but I've been writing Linux/BSD software in C for 15 years.
Point is, Visual Studio express may be crap.. but if they had it 15 years ago.. I'm sure I would have learned to program in Windows instead. Might never have switched to Linux at all.
So IMO, it's a smart/critical piece of software from MS. It's a bit much to expect people who are learning to program to immediately spend hundreds of dollars.
Do you visit often? This pattern of posting has been going on consistently for some time now.
It may be shilling. It may be trolling. One thing it is not, however, is honesty and constructive commentary.
Your objections are naive.
Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law
out of curiousity and because I had a 30 minute wait, I decided to have a look at Windows phones they have on display in the store. ... it was crashed.
There were 5 different devices, I picked one up
89% of market share is irrelevant?
89% of _desktop_ market share, and they're throwing a tablet OS onto future desktop systems so they probably won't even manage to maintain that.
Do you really think people are sitting around saying 'you know, I'd love to buy a tablet, but I won't until they run Windows'?
...have been supported from day one. That would have put them almost to the 200K mark immediately. Sure, the experience for many apps would have been suboptimal (something like the third-party app experience on Android) but the numbers would look impressive and, as we can see from the sales of WP7, app numbers seem to be the only thing that sells devices.
Do you really think people are sitting around saying 'you know, I'd love to buy a tablet, but I won't until they run Windows'?
I am waiting at least to that point, probably longer, since tablets that run windows have been out for years now.
Were you trying to be smart?
"His name was James Damore."
Yeah, because anyone who who would dare offer a comment in defense of Microsoft could only be a paid shill!
His comment looks legit to me. He's right that there shouldn't be any expectation of app compatibility between WP7 and WP8 -- they're two completely different animals. Just like you shouldn't expect BB7 apps to run under BB10. This is not new in the mobile space.
h4rr4r may be naive, I don't know, but you're very clearly a conspiracy nut!
Required reading for internet skeptics
When I saw that in US universities, students are actually taught to use Windows, Visual Studio, and to program in C#, I was shocked at how influential Microsoft was in the US, and how bad the situation was.
Doing this is a terrible idea, reliance on a IDE means they don't understand how the compilation tool chain works, and they get stuck using this sub-par software, which, to top things off, is also proprietary and restricted to Microsoft platforms.
No wonder Inda and China are better, American students are not taught software engineering, they're taught how to be code monkeys.
semi serious question here. how is MS judged to be the largest? Company value? range of products? manufacturing ability? I don't wish to troll I'm just curious as to how they get the title of largest.
There was an unknown error in the submission.
Well, it's a step up from getting chimpanzees to design their UIs!
"You can lead a horse to water but a pencil must be lead!" - Stan Laurel
They are big countries and they do crank out more of every profession you can think of - live with it.
According to some "close to Microsoft" opinions, Microsoft is offering software companies their own specialists "for free", only to create wow-applications which would convince big customers to upgrade to Windows 8. But apparently it's not going to happen any time soon. Here's the article, anyway: http://kirsanov.net/post/2012/09/17/The-Future-of-Windows-8.aspx
iOS and Android have what, 85-90% of the US smartphone market, slightly lower elsewhere
Has WP7 even passed WP6 yet in marketshare? RIM is hemorrhaging share like they've been run over by a bus, twice.
iOS has really good backwards and forwards compatibility, and makes it pretty straightforward to use new features while still running on older software and hardware [and don't forget, best in class OS updates for old hardware]
Android, good forwards compatibility, hassle to get backwards compatibility [use new features while still running on older OSes], while having limited support for running newer OSes on older hardware.
RIM: FINALLY getting a clue and rewriting their OS, but pretty much zero support for running newer OSes on older hardware, same Java hassle to use new OS features while retaining support for older OSes [for current versions] I believe new version will throw all existing software under the bus. So this is a total reboot of the platform, starting from zero.
Microsoft: got a clue several years ago to rewrite OS and throw all existing users under the bus, decided it was so much fun last year, might as well do it again this year. Actually is trying to trick existing users into thinking they aren't being thrown under bus by reskinning existing home screen to look and work like new version, no actual new features and can't run new software.
Just based on history, why would ANYBODY consider jumping on the WP bandwagon, because it means buying not just new phones to get updates, but repurchasing your software [after waiting for it to be rewritten] to use the new features of the new OS.
Sleep your way to a whiter smile...date a dentist!