Today I’d like to look away from my traditional SharePoint, Project and SQL focus. I've been watching the blog - tweet - web stream of news from last week’s Microsoft BUILD Conference with interest. There's been a lot of interest in Windows 8 - both for tablet and traditional form factors. Microsoft has even distributed 5000 Samsung tablets (these guys are everywhere!) reloaded with an early version of Windows 8. Wow. (And how do I get one!)
So Microsoft has been trying to get the rest of you to use Windows Phones. They're easy, powerful, functional. And they have tens of thousands of apps. Not the 450 billion, of whatever, in the Android Marketplace, but pretty good.
(At some level, all the debates about the numbers of apps available in the Android, Apple or Windows AppStores remind me of the 1960s-1980s debates about the Soviet "missile gap". If the USSR had enough strike power to cover the earth's surface 30 times over, the US needed 40X. And so forth.)
At some level, if you were to download and use ten new apps daily from the Android store, it would take you over 120 years to try them all. 120 years! Don't we have enough?
And that's the clever thing about Microsft's strategy. Over the past two years, the clear message has been to develop mobile apps in Silverlight, and you can reuse them on a PC. That seems ok, but the Windows mobile ecosystem isn't yet as vibrant and diverse as the PC world.
Windows 8 promises to change the paradigm. In addition to support for HTML5, Javascript with Live Tile and mutitouch support, etc. the really interesting changes are outside. Microsoft is creating delivery “plumbing” by opening an app store that supplies not just mobile, not just phones, but also Windows PCs. So there's even more incentive for developers to build mobile apps. Because now, rather than targeting “only” ten million Windows Phone users for your app, you now have the vast universe of all Windows PCs available to you – by far, single largest potential user base in the technical world.
Nothing is guaranteed, but I can’t wait to see where this market is by the end of next year.
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