Trouble For Microsoft Developers With the Windows Store 232
An anonymous reader writes "This blog post from an un-happy Microsoft developer highlights many of the problems that developers are having with submitting to the new Windows store. His app, that won 2 App X challenges from Microsoft, has been rejected 6 times over 2 months with no clear indications as to the cause. This is even after going through a rigorous early-certification process. With Windows RT relying solely on apps from the store, and there being just over 7,000 apps total, Microsoft could have a big problem here."
Re:this guy is an idiot (Score:5, Interesting)
No, pretty sure *you* are the idiot here. If you'd actually RTFA, instead of whatever brief skim you took, you'd have seen that the guy ran WACK every time... and that it always ran clean on his system. He eventually got a failure out of it by running his VM's performance down to the Win8 mimum specs, but even after fixing that he continued getting unexplained errors from the certification process that didn't show up on his local system.
Also, WACK failed to catch a very simple and obvious thing - a piece of dev/test code that he'd left in a constructor, which will crash the app when run if installed from the store - that it clearly should have. That's exactly the kind of thing that static analysis should have found.
I'm rather shocked by Microsoft's failures, here. Usually, they're very good with dev tools and communication. Not this time, it seems. You'd think they'd have learned from the problems Apple had... it almost feels like they're trying to repeat Apple's mistakes too.
Re:"could have a big problem" (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:"could have a big problem" (Score:5, Interesting)
Why do you think that another mobile failure will marginalize MS? None of the previous ones did. Are you under the impression that everybody's going to throw away their PC and start using a tablet? That's not what's happening. PC sales are stagnant because the market's saturated. Tablet sales are booming because it's new use case that users are just beginning to move to. One is not being replaced by the other.
It's true that this is going to hurt MS. But they'll still collect a tithe for every non-Mac PC sold, and they'll still sell a lot of server licenses. As these markets saturate, they will cease to make MS uber-profitable, but these markets are still big, and will remain so — as will Microsoft.
Re:"could have a big problem" (Score:5, Interesting)
For those who prefer metric, that's about 195.6 cm. He's well above 99th percentile for height. Big, too. Kind of an imposing-looking guy, in fact.
Actually doesn't really matter to it (Score:2, Interesting)
The Surface was dead before it ever launched. The reason is that there is no tablet market, there's an iPad market.
Most people have no use for tablets. There are niche uses (the in medicine) but by and large there just isn't a real use for tablets. People are not going to be able to get rid of their computers because tablets are lousy for content creation, even basic content like writing an e-mail or forum post. However they aren't portable like a smartphone so you don't take it with you all the time. They try to fill a niche where your smartphone isn't large enough for what you need, but your laptop isn't portable enough. There is almost none of that in a normal person's life. I've yet to meet someone that has dumped their smartphone or computer for their tablet and as such they really don't need it.
However, the iPad is a cool tech toy, and fashion accessory, to have. People want one because it is cool, not because they need it. They want to be seen with it and they want to mess around with it. However that is only the case because it is an iPad. Apple makes the cool consumer electronics currently. MS never will, they are horrible at selling style.
So they are trying to get in to a market that just isn't there. Tablets are going to fade away as the fad passes. People will find that their smartphone is just more convenient for the "small" computing needs and that a laptop or maybe desktop are better when you need to do some work or the like.
Even if they had a stellar app store with tons of apps the surface still wouldn't go anywhere because nobody gives a shit because it isn't an iPad.
Goddamn "evangelists" (Score:5, Interesting)
How apt: belief based development.
Back in the mid 90s, I worked at a games company where we were struggling to get the performance of Direct3D Retained Mode (anyone else remember that?) up to anywhere near Glide levels on Voodoo hardware. It was "escalated" until some DirectX "evangelist" rocked up at our office to "assist."
His "assistance" consisted of looking out of the window and telling us that we must be doing something wrong, because his developers assured him that D3DRM should perform better than anything that we could roll ourselves.
"Look," we said, "here's the same app, showing the same scene, and the framerate of the D3DRM version is half that of Glide."
But he wouldn't look. He literally wouldn't look at the screens. He wouldn't even acknowledge the problem. Just kept going on about how we must be mis-using it, because he had been assured.
Needless to say, we dropped D3DRM, as did everyone else, and it died in a corner, alone and unloved. But it did give us a valuable insight into the developer and "evangelist" culture at Microsoft. I think all Windows developers learn it eventually, which is why Microsoft need a constant influx of bright eyed, bushy tailed young suckers who'll fall for the line that they only hurt us because they love us so much.
Not just app store - MS developer key nightmare (Score:2, Interesting)
Its not just the app store that is the problem. I was about to purchase a MSDN subscription, and took a peek at the current situation with respect to license keys and installation of developer operating systems, and couldn't believe how much effort MS must have expended in creating such a confusing and unmanageable mess. They wont get my money. It is much more expedient to NOT develop for Windows. I will continue developing for various mobile platforms, and Linux, and even IOS, but MS has made everything far too difficult.
It would seem that MS has never really properly weighed up the economics of draconian license keys vs the benefits of implicitly TRUSTING THEIR DEVELOPERS. MS used to trust me as a developer - and I behaved 100% in accordance with that trust - but now they DON'T TRUST ME and as a result I NOW HATE THEM. That is the outcome they have generated. I will never purchase an MSDN subscription ever again.
Have MS forgotten what a stack trace is? (Score:4, Interesting)
Why the hell aren't Microsoft sending stack traces of crashes back to developers? Are they so incompetent that they've forgotten how software is developed?