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Android and iOS App Porting Will Not Be Available At Windows 10 Launch
An anonymous reader writes: Arguably the biggest news out of Microsoft's Build 2015 conference was that developers will be able to bring Web apps, Windows desktop apps (Win32), as well as Android and iOS mobile apps to the Windows Store. Yet each of these work differently, and there are a lot of nuances, so we talked to Todd Brix, general manager of Windows apps and store, to get some more detail. First and foremost, upon Windows 10's launch, developers will only be able to bring Web apps to the Windows Store. The Win32, Android, and iOS app toolkits will not be ready in time. That said, with Microsoft's Windows as a service strategy, they will arrive as part of later updates
This is all actually quite promising but thanks for all the negativity.
To address each of your points.
Photoshop - Does anyone "really" run this on Windows?! I thought that was mostly a Mac thing, but whatever, I'll give that one to you.
Full Office - This is the big thing about the Build 2015, Office becoming its own platform. This "run Android / iOS" crap pales in comparison to the Office as a platform part. If Microsoft can do this whole thing "right" Office will become bigger than anything they imagined.
World of Warcraft - Really? Just no, you don't get that one.
All productivity software - That depends on your definition of that word. Many of our most productive folks work with OLAP cubes and our big data stuff in all in cloud. Most documentation done in house is in the cloud with the software to produce it in the cloud. To be fair though, we're mostly an IBM i shop and most everything runs on that i, aside from Excel, Word, and PowerPoint (we ditched Exchanged long time ago and wondered why we didn't do it sooner). So because of your vague-iness, I'm not giving you that one, and also a lot of productivity isn't done by humans anyway and the part that is done requires different tools than the tools people used for productivity ten years ago.
I'm pretty sure Windows has a place in the future, but desktop for the majority of folks is dead. I see more and more iPads with BT keyboards replacing laptops at colleges, I see more big data/cloud services in companies, I see more things becoming automated that once was some "productivity" thing humans did. Each day I see fat desktops becoming less usable. That's not to say they'll go away, far from that, but they aren't going to be the dominate device for much longer. Microsoft has had some serious issues with getting a solid mobile product to market and it is killing them. If they make good on the Office as a platform thing, they'll be in a much better position than they are now. However, we are past the point where Microsoft just has to put out a good device or a good OS. They've got to become the preferred device, the preferred OS. People are going to have some random Wintel in their house that gets dusted off for the term paper or whatever, but Microsoft really needs to get into the position where people are letting their iPhones collect dust if they really stand a chance for a brighter future than being relegated to the thing you see when you get to work.