Microsoft Pursues WebOS Devs, Offers Free Phones 209
CWmike writes "Taking advantage of Hewlett-Packard's departure from the tablet and smartphone market, Microsoft has offered webOS developers free phones, tools and training to create apps for Windows Phone 7. Brandon Watson, Microsoft's senior director of Windows Phone 7 development, made the offer on Twitter on Friday, and has been fielding queries ever since. 'To Any Published WebOS Devs: We'll give you what you need to be successful on #WindowsPhone, incl. free phones, dev tools, and training, etc.,' Watson said a day after HP's announcement. Before Friday was out, Watson said he had received more than 500 emails from interested developers, and later, that the count was closing in on 600."
Microsoft's Cellphone OS Marketshare Is Plummeting (Score:4, Informative)
http://ir.comscore.com/releasedetail.cfm?ReleaseID=596854 [comscore.com]
Only the effectively dead Symbian is keeping Microsoft out of last place in the cellphone market right now.
Free stuff is nice, but developers aren't going to waste their time on a dying platform like Windows Phone 7.
Re:Microsoft is really well positioned here (Score:4, Informative)
and apart from iOS the only system with strong design behind it is WP7.
I see you are impressed by cheap ui parlor tricks. Fortunately, some people aren't [cnet.com].
2) With Google buying a hardware company, Microsoft is well positioned to say "WP7 is the only OS you can use where the OS designer is not competing with you".
And the OEMs will see through the smokescreen. The MicroNokia partnership does not a fair windows phone playing field make.
3) Nokia WP7 phones starting to come online soon.
I have yet to hear one single person in real life say they give a shit about Nokia windows phones. This fiction that Nokia is going to save windows phone is pure fanboy talking point. If people were that wedded to Nokia, their market share wouldn't be in the gutter now.
There's a very real possibility WP7 could start cutting in to Android marketshare before too long...
based on what? This nonsense you've posted? Ha!
Android has never been in a better position than it is in right now. The OEMs know google is serious with 25,000 patents, 600,000 activations daily, steadily climbing market share. You need to wake up, man.
Re:And... (Score:4, Informative)
(PalmOS had 60,000+ apps and was ocnsidered far superior to PocketPC in speed and elegance, but it died because Palm couldn't keep up with flashy and the OS was creaky).
Palm had more problems than that. Palm had long been an ineptly-managed company where one hand (some pun intended) never knew nor cared what the other was doing. In the late 90s, the founders quit and formed Handspring to compete directly with Palm -- that should tell you how long things have been fishy. Eventually Palm bought Handspring back and merged it with its own hardware division, but by that time Palm had split off its software division into its own company, for reasons that doubtless must have looked good on paper but didn't seem to make much sense in the real world. The software division was busy creating a new version of Palm OS that was a little more "flashy," but meanwhile the hardware division, in its infinite wisdom, decided to start putting out Treos running Windows Mobile. The software division reasoned that it didn't have much of a future as an OS licensing company with one major customer when the customer wasn't even committed to its stuff, so it sold itself to a Japanese company. A couple years later, Palm decided it did want the new version of Palm OS after all, so it had to license it from the Japanese company for $40 million -- but never shipped a single device that used it. Instead it started over again from scratch to develop webOS. Then it got bought by HP, and the rest is history.
Palm started out with a really groundbreaking, quality product. Unfortunately its history as a company seems to have peaked right before it was bought by 3Com, and the rest has been sort of a sad joke. The later successes (Treo), can really be attributed to Handspring, which was formed because the founders weren't getting anything accomplished under 3Com.
Re:Microsoft's Cellphone OS Marketshare Is Plummet (Score:3, Informative)
Kept out of last place by Symbian? Only in the US. According to this [blogs.com] analyst, worldwide WP7 has around 1% smartphone marketshare. Symbians "effectively dead" OS still had around 15% in Q2, outselling WP7 15 to 1.
Not to take away the point of your post of course, but the situation for WP7 seems actually much worse than what your link projects