Microsoft's Kin failure is still in the back of my mind. What's to say they won't kill this one too? Why take the development risk?
Microsoft Launches Windows Phone 7 But Does Anyone Care?
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Re: Microsoft Launches Windows Phone 7 But Does Anyone Care?
#12Microsoft's Kin failure is still in the back of my mind. What's to say they won't kill this one too? Why take the development risk?
Big differences. MS is betting big on this, whereas with Kin it was a small team that did it. Kin apparently had very little internal support. Kin wasn't pushed by MS, but had a contractual obligation with Verizon. That's why Kin launched on one carrier only. Apparently WP7 is launching on 60 carriers, with 9 or 10 different phones. The mobile, VS, Silverlight, XBox, Zune, and Office teams are all apparently very engaged.
MS won't kill this. I wouldn't let that be a factor on doing development. Now it may take a while for it to get consumer uptake. That may temper if you want to develop for it. But given that this device should sell moderately well with a good app store, it may have better ROI than the same app showing up in the Android app store, even with the larger number of Android devices.
Re: Microsoft Launches Windows Phone 7 But Does Anyone Care?
#13I hope it succeeds at least enough to give Apple some competition in development tools.
Re: Microsoft Launches Windows Phone 7 But Does Anyone Care?
#14I think it's fantastic. As someone who has done a decent bit of iPhone development, I can definitely say that I prefer developing in VS with C# than XCode with Objective-C. It's disheartening that so many bloggers are dismissing this awesome platform simply because Microsoft is "late to the game", yet they forget how successful Android has been. At this point, it looks like Google and Microsoft are fresh and new, whe…
While I might agree that the Obj-C language is long in the tooth, iOS/Cocoa Touch is really a new platform that sprung from the ashes of the aging Cocoa.
The iOS folks got to start from near scratch, building on the foundation they already knew so well.
And I'd say they did a pretty great job.
Re: Microsoft Launches Windows Phone 7 But Does Anyone Care?
#15I think it's fantastic. As someone who has done a decent bit of iPhone development, I can definitely say that I prefer developing in VS with C# than XCode with Objective-C. It's disheartening that so many bloggers are dismissing this awesome platform simply because Microsoft is "late to the game", yet they forget how successful Android has been. At this point, it looks like Google and Microsoft are fresh and new, whe…
> It's disheartening that so many bloggers are dismissing this awesome platform simply because Microsoft is "late to the game", yet they forget how successful Android has been.
Not only that, but I recall dismissing Xbox because Microsoft was so late to the game for video-game consoles that I thought they couldn't possibly have any impact.
Boy, how wrong I was...
Re: Microsoft Launches Windows Phone 7 But Does Anyone Care?
#16Tons of people prefer the Microsoft environment. Neither Google nor Apple have offered many of these people what they want in a dev environment. Apple's required an odd language up until very recently, and even the C# language you can write to doesn't do many of the things they're used to doing C# in. Android's development resources are capable, but Eclipse is a far cry from Visual Studio... I assume tons of people w…
The tools don't matter, it might be nice, but even though "tons of people prefer the Microsoft environment" I can't recall the last time they produced a product having superior user experience thanks to those tools. I can't name a single website/webapp/desktop app that I enjoy using on a daily base made with visual studio. I know a lot of the game companies use visual studio (c++) to produce parts of their games, but I'm not sure which of the latest games are produced using XNA.
My point is the tools don't matter as much as the strategy and decisions of Microsoft in other parts of the ecosystem to attract talent to produce content for their devices.
Re: Microsoft Launches Windows Phone 7 But Does Anyone Care?
#17Microsoft's Kin failure is still in the back of my mind. What's to say they won't kill this one too? Why take the development risk?
Big differences. MS is betting big on this, whereas with Kin it was a small team that did it. Kin apparently had very little internal support. Kin wasn't pushed by MS, but had a contractual obligation with Verizon. That's why Kin launched on one carrier only. Apparently WP7 is launching on 60 carriers, with 9 or 10 different phones. The mobile, VS, Silverlight, XBox, Zune, and Office teams are all apparently very eng…
This time for Microsoft, it's win or die trying. And they know that.
Re: Microsoft Launches Windows Phone 7 But Does Anyone Care?
#18I think it's fantastic. As someone who has done a decent bit of iPhone development, I can definitely say that I prefer developing in VS with C# than XCode with Objective-C. It's disheartening that so many bloggers are dismissing this awesome platform simply because Microsoft is "late to the game", yet they forget how successful Android has been. At this point, it looks like Google and Microsoft are fresh and new, whe…
I think the fear for Windows being "late to the game" isn't that MS will have a hard time getting mindshare, but I think they are going to have a hard time getting "developer share".
Basically if I'm going to develop my hip new mobile app that's ready to take over the world I'm going to start with Android and iPhone and wait and see what OS I'm going to tackle next, and the way I'm going to figure that out is by sales numbers and right now even there are more Palm devices then WP7.
Re: Microsoft Launches Windows Phone 7 But Does Anyone Care?
#19Tons of people prefer the Microsoft environment. Neither Google nor Apple have offered many of these people what they want in a dev environment. Apple's required an odd language up until very recently, and even the C# language you can write to doesn't do many of the things they're used to doing C# in. Android's development resources are capable, but Eclipse is a far cry from Visual Studio... I assume tons of people w…
Many game companies can target this platform much more easily than the iPhone/Android handsets as it also works off XNA. Seems like its lack of OpenGL offsets that a good bit... yes, a lot of Xbox/Windows games will be easy to port, but it seems like more ports will likely to be coming from iPhone/Android.
Following up to myself here: this could have some interesting benefits for Microsoft, too — iPhone has the most/best games right now, but Android is selling a ton of units so lots of folks are thinking about porting their iPhone games to Android. If WP7 was the inverse of what it is (if it had OpenGL and no XNA), it'd be seen as the third platform, something to maybe, possibly consider porting to once you'd ported to Android. That doesn't seem desirable at all. At least with XNA, they'll have the possibility of getting a lot of different games than what is available on iPhone and Android... some differentiation, which is exactly what they need.
Re: Microsoft Launches Windows Phone 7 But Does Anyone Care?
#20Tons of people prefer the Microsoft environment. Neither Google nor Apple have offered many of these people what they want in a dev environment. Apple's required an odd language up until very recently, and even the C# language you can write to doesn't do many of the things they're used to doing C# in. Android's development resources are capable, but Eclipse is a far cry from Visual Studio... I assume tons of people w…
The tools don't matter, it might be nice, but even though "tons of people prefer the Microsoft environment" I can't recall the last time they produced a product having superior user experience thanks to those tools. I can't name a single website/webapp/desktop app that I enjoy using on a daily base made with visual studio. I know a lot of the game companies use visual studio (c++) to produce parts of their games, but…
I use windows 7 on a daily basis and I enjoy it! And I bet it's made with visual studio.