How Microsoft Is Wooing College Kids To Write Apps For Windows 8 187
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.'"
Quantity over quality? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Visual Studio (Score:1, Insightful)
He's just a shill. Any story even halfway related to MS these days is hit by a marketer immediately, with the first comment invariably singing the praises of Visual Studio.
the apps in the store suck (Score:5, Insightful)
Legacy of NeXT's InterfaceBuilder.app? (Score:5, Insightful)
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
Re:Visual Studio (Score:2, Insightful)
Only to grow up locked into an MS language which could be dumped as quickly as Silverlight.
Nice try shill.
Maybe not such a good Idea (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:Technet + Dreamspark (Score:2, Insightful)