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Cellphones HP Handhelds Microsoft

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."
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Microsoft Pursues WebOS Devs, Offers Free Phones

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  • by Trillan ( 597339 ) on Monday August 22, 2011 @03:47PM (#37170562) Homepage Journal

    'll give you what you need to be successful on #WindowsPhone, incl. free phones, dev tools, and training, etc"

    Success being, of course, a relative term. I would like to think that developers having their plans broken by WebOS's collapse would make future plans based more on market size and what success on a platform would actually look like rather than free hardware and an emotional outreach. But maybe not; after all, they developed for WebOS to begin with.

    • by Locutus ( 9039 ) on Monday August 22, 2011 @07:01PM (#37172934)
      I would think they'd be asking about the hooks involved and if they'd get a free phone they could hack or pawn just saying "yes" and nothing more. I'm with the other /. post saying they already got the rug pulled out from under on a small market project and might want more security than Microsoft promises. We all know what Microsoft promises are worth.

      LoB
  • by scorp1us ( 235526 ) on Monday August 22, 2011 @03:52PM (#37170626) Journal

    You could have just downloaded everything you needed for free... The only fee is for listing in the Ovi store.

    I never got how you could bounce around on stage like a monkey yelling "developers" and still charge people to develop on your platform.

    • by GameboyRMH ( 1153867 ) <gameboyrmh&gmail,com> on Monday August 22, 2011 @03:55PM (#37170676) Journal

      The only fee is for listing in the Ovi store.

      And for those who don't know, the Ovi store is an optional, separate, curated store for commercial apps.

    • by Microlith ( 54737 ) on Monday August 22, 2011 @03:56PM (#37170686)

      The only fee is for listing in the Ovi store.

      MeeGo is not tied to the Ovi Store. The Ovi store will be used only by MeeGo-Harmattan, which is a "compatible" OS based off Maemo that includes all the Qt APIs of MeeGo (but no others.)

      Also, MeeGo needs a handset developer that isn't Nokia.

    • by djdanlib ( 732853 ) on Monday August 22, 2011 @03:56PM (#37170692) Homepage

      Someone appears to have obtained some more common sense over at MS and the basic dev tools including the IDE are free nowadays.

      See? It even comes with Expression Blend. http://www.microsoft.com/visualstudio/en-us/products/2010-editions/windows-phone-developer-tools [microsoft.com]

    • by HarrySquatter ( 1698416 ) on Monday August 22, 2011 @04:19PM (#37171000)

      I never got how you could bounce around on stage like a monkey yelling "developers" and still charge people to develop on your platform.

      You've always been able to freely develop for Windows. It's not as if you've HAD to have Visual Studio to do so. Secondly, for most software companies the cost of Visual Studio is a drop in the bucket in comparison to even 1 week of all their programmer's salaries combined.

      • by PCM2 ( 4486 ) on Monday August 22, 2011 @04:55PM (#37171510) Homepage

        Not to mention, the cost of Visual Studio is also a drop in the bucket compared to what it used to cost to license a C/C++ compiler from the big commercial Unix vendors, which didn't even come with an IDE. It's not as if Microsoft invented the idea that developers should have to pay something for commercial tools.

    • by godrik ( 1287354 ) on Monday August 22, 2011 @05:11PM (#37171746)

      But is there actually any meego phone I can buy ? Or a meego tablet ? As far as I understood, it is still in dvelopment.

  • by milbournosphere ( 1273186 ) on Monday August 22, 2011 @03:52PM (#37170630)
    Microsoft should try to get their hands on the webOS IP as well. WebOS was really cool, and MS could really shake things up in the mobile OS market if they were to start integrating webOS features into their mobile OS. Their growing market share might force Google and Apple to come up with similar features once Windows Phone 7 gets a large user base.
  • by VisibleSchlong ( 2422274 ) on Monday August 22, 2011 @03:53PM (#37170642)

    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.

    • Is the viability of the platform really a marketshare issue or is it really about installed base?

      • It doesn't matter for Windows 7, it never had marketshare, so it has a miniscule and shrinking installed base.

    • by Imbrondir ( 2367812 ) on Monday August 22, 2011 @05:46PM (#37172184)

      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

    • WinMo is dying. WP7 is rising. Currently the death of WinMo is faster than the rise of WP7, but that's not actually so surprising to me - WinMo was a mature but outdated platform, and WP7 is new and still somewhat immature (in terms of app store size, APIs, etc.). They're also in totally different niches, though - WP7 is much closer to the iOS style of walled garden (hopefully with a bit more transparency) while WinMo was closer to Android or even Maemo; not open source, but you could write and publish whatever you wanted for it, tweaking the system at almost any level.

      As WP7 matures within its niche, it will start picking up users much more quickly. Once WinMo is fully abandoned (not far off now; it's not been popular for years but was holding on at Apple-like marketshare until the last year or so), you won't see the month-to-month percentage decrease because of it. Don't count on WP7 not becoming a major player, either - the app store is growing very quickly (compared to where competitors were at this point in their release cycles, it's doing very well indeed) and the Mango update addresses a lot of the missing feature complaints and SDK limitations.

    • I'm reserving judgement until Netcraft confirms it.
  • by jellomizer ( 103300 ) on Monday August 22, 2011 @03:58PM (#37170714)

    WebOS is the new beOS. A lot of people like it, but never really quite good enough to get mass market share. Then after its death developers spread across different platform and introducing a lot of beOS's goodness across many OS's

  • by Kildjean ( 871084 ) on Monday August 22, 2011 @03:59PM (#37170728) Homepage

    You have to be really desperate to pick up the devs of a dead platform so that you can succeed.

  • by bogaboga ( 793279 ) on Monday August 22, 2011 @04:01PM (#37170748)

    Much as I loathe Microsoft, I think that their platform is one of the front-runners for developers at the moment. As a developer, I would not touch Microsoft even with a 10 foot pole though, mainly because the platform receives more 'bad press coverage' than good at present.

    • by LWATCDR ( 28044 ) on Monday August 22, 2011 @04:48PM (#37171404) Homepage Journal

      You mean it is is in the top three or four?
      I find it amusing because Microsoft is in the same boat that it has put every other OS in since the DOS days.
      A large number of users have already gone to Android and IOS. They have the most apps and support. Not to mention that a lot of people on Android are fully intwined in the Google ecosystem of gmail, google music, google plus, and so on.
      Microsoft now has to so much better than everything else that people will go through the pain of leaving. Today new smartphone users are not the early adopter types so they will go to the platforms that everybody else is on.
      A lot of people will compair this to the Xbox but it is very different at least in the US. The hard core gamers will drop a few hundred on getting a second or even third console just to try it out. In the US you are often tied to a carrier for two years and a platform mistake is painful. That and most people do not have buy extra cell phones to try out. A few may have two a work and personal phone but most people have a single phone.
      WP7 is just not good enough to make people jump ship.

  • Good call (Score:4, Funny)

    by nilbog ( 732352 ) on Monday August 22, 2011 @04:02PM (#37170768) Homepage Journal

    This is a great call - those developers turned Web OS into the wildly successful platform it is today.

    • by shutdown -p now ( 807394 ) on Monday August 22, 2011 @04:06PM (#37170812) Journal

      From everything I've heard about webOS, the platform itself is excellent from both user experience and technical standpoint. It was poor marketing and strategy that killed it.

      • by oakgrove ( 845019 ) on Monday August 22, 2011 @04:21PM (#37171044)
        My understanding was that it was laggy on the touchpad and suffered from lackluster hardware both in design and performance on the phones.
        • by saihung ( 19097 ) on Monday August 22, 2011 @04:32PM (#37171186)

          The only thing wrong with it on phones, as far as I can see, are that the bluetooth stack sucks butt and that the bundled PDF reader is kind of rubbish. The cut-and-paste facility is also kind of lackluster. But for most everything I do, the experience has been good. I enjoy using the UI, it's not especially laggy.

          • by PCM2 ( 4486 ) on Monday August 22, 2011 @04:59PM (#37171564) Homepage

            You responded to a comment about "lackluster hardware" with two comments about software. Every review of a webOS phone I've read has said the phone feels kind of cheap and flimsy, the specs are sub-average when compared to competing phones, and this or that is a little buggy, but it shows a lot of promise and the next phone ought to make a real dent in the market once they get the kinks ironed out. Of course, we waited and waited, but there was no next phone.

        • by Chirs ( 87576 ) on Monday August 22, 2011 @05:06PM (#37171664)

          I bought the touchpad on the weekend. I don't really have anything to compare it with, but I don't have any complaints about the UI performance. Some apps don't scroll particularly smoothly, but most do so I think it's an app-specific issue. Reading slashdot works just fine.

          I've seen comments that some of the "homebrew" apps can make a significant difference in the apparent speed of the system--among other things the stock WebOS leaves a lot of logging enabled that doesn't need to be.

  • by account_deleted ( 4530225 ) on Monday August 22, 2011 @04:10PM (#37170870)
    Comment removed based on user account deletion
  • since their tools are free already.

  • by moderators_are_w*nke ( 571920 ) on Monday August 22, 2011 @04:16PM (#37170952) Journal

    The market share of WebOS has just gone ballistic. $99 a tablet - genius.

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