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."
Relative (Score:3)
'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.
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LoB
And with Meego... (Score:2)
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.
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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.
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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.
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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]
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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.
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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.
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And just look at those big commercial Unix vendors now!...Oops.
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Good idea. Ignore all the other compilers like Borland C++, Watcom C++, Intel C++, Mingw32 etc. Also ignore other languages like Borland Delphi and Java. And ignore the compilers that come with Windows with .NET (C#, VB.NET). And ignore the free C++ compiler that comes with the Windows SDK (which is the same compiler as used by Visual Studio).
Then limit yourself to saying that a well behaved Win32 program must use Microsoft's libraries and you correctly (but artificially) limit the selection down to a Micro
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Good idea. Ignore all the other compilers like Borland C++, Watcom C++, Intel C++, Mingw32 etc.
I admit that I had ignored Borland, Watcom, and Intel products. But the thread I linked was about MinGW.
Also ignore other languages like Borland Delphi and Java.
If the existing codebase is in C++, then I need to either use a C++ compiler or find some way to automate translation of C++ into Pascal or Java. But in fact, in comments to other articles, some people have recommended writing my own compiler that compiles various other languages into C# so that the code will be useful on Xbox 360 or Windows Phone 7. What is the best practice to migrate an existing applic
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But is there actually any meego phone I can buy ? Or a meego tablet ? As far as I understood, it is still in dvelopment.
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It's as "in development" as any Linux distribution and the components that it is composed of. Currently the last significant point release was 1.2, which stabilized the compliance rules and APIs. Work is underway on 1.3.
Not just the developers... (Score:2)
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The webOS guy is at Android now. Let the Palm/HP webOS go away quietly.
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.
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Is the viability of the platform really a marketshare issue or is it really about installed base?
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It doesn't matter for Windows 7, it never had marketshare, so it has a miniscule and shrinking installed base.
I don't think users really care about apps (Score:3)
Yeah, some do, and for vertical markets the apps are of critical importance. But I don't think that most people really care that much about which or how many apps are available for their device.
Instead they buy devices that their friends and family also have, or that are readily available in the area where they live. It is only after making a purchase that they start to care about apps.
I used to live in Silicon Valley. Everybody had iPhones there. I live in Washington state now. Everyone here has Andro
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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
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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 what
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XBOX 360 is great these days.
Zune was superior to the iPod Classic in every way but 3rd party support (better UI, better PC software). At least for Windows users.
And WP7 is a really decent OS, hitting a happy medium between the fragmentation of Android and the "My way or the high way" of Steve Jobs's walled garden, one-size-fits-all iOS.
WP7 has a few major flaws, and all of them flow from the fact that it's about two years late to market. It certainly deserves to do better than it's doing.
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The only reason I see for that is the cross game chat and gaming groups. Otherwise the PS3 has other/better features, IMHO. Sony's been stupid by not introducing it, but with memory limitations (promises to developers/prior games) I can see why they haven't. You can practically guarantee it'll be in the PS4 though unless they are totally brain dead. I personally don't partake in chat unless I have to (strategy, etc.), but I can see the appeal.
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As far as I know, you don't hear chatter from other games. I'm pretty sure that when you join another game, you "leave" your friends channel and join the game channel. When you exit the game, you get kicked back to your friends. I never paid attention while my friend was playing his box but I'm pretty certain that you don't hear other people in other games.
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How would you define success as it relates to windows phone 7? Apple is successful in making money with iOS and Android is successful in market share and ad revenue for Google. How is wp7 successful?
Some of us are crazy enough to judge a product's success on its quality. In that regard it wipes the floor with iOS and Android.
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It also has the fastest growth of the recent smartphone app stores for published applications.
90% growth! From 1 MS funded app to 10 in just 6 months could achieve this statistic!
Android is here, has the buzz, and has the goods to back it. MS no longer has to be "good enough", they have to be compellingly better. They had everything they needed to make it happen, including a decade (yes, a DECADE) to figure it out with WinMo 1 through WinMo 6.x. After all those generations, they still had only a cheesy int
WebOS the new beOS (Score:2)
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
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Actually WebOS was good enough. The SDK at least the first release was crippled and then HP... Well HP spent 1.2 Billion on it and then waited a year to ship products that where already in the pipeline. The Pre3 should have shipped 8 months ago an should have the Touchpad.
Begging for Crumbs... (Score:2)
You have to be really desperate to pick up the devs of a dead platform so that you can succeed.
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It's the Old Maid Windows trolling the funeral homes looking for a date.
Do not dismiss M$ (Score:2)
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.
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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 smartpho
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WP7 requires verifiably type-safe, Emit-free CIL (Score:2)
[People care that] they get the apps they want. WP7 is newer and lagging behind Android and iOS in this regard. Getting more developers will help.
All third-party applications for Windows Phone 7 must be written in verifiably type-safe, Emit-free CIL, which is all that runs under its limited version of the .NET Compact Framework. This means a lot of existing applications will never be ported to Windows Phone 7 because their logic layer [pineight.com] is written in a language that does not compile to verifiably type-safe, Emit-free CIL. Standard C++ and Objective-C aren't verifiably type-safe, IronPython and other DLR languages aren't Emit-free, and I've read that se
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Doesn't matter. In 1986 you had the Commodore Amiga with multi-tasking, a flat memory model, stereo sound, and a real OS. Then you had MS-DOS with a limit of 33 megabytes on a partition and no real graphics, audio, multitasking or much of anything really.
Which won?
As good isn't good enough. Better isn't good enough. Mind-numbingly better is just barley going to be good enough. Frankly the lack of turn by turn is enough for me to not want it.
Good call (Score:4, Funny)
This is a great call - those developers turned Web OS into the wildly successful platform it is today.
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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.
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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.
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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.
not laggy (Score:2)
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.
Windows Phone 7 over Android? (Score:3)
That's like asking BeOS or Amiga developers to migrate to Windows over say BSD or Linux.
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The developers that were targeting WebOS were certainly already also targeted Android and iOS.
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Agreed. WimPy7s skills won't even translate to a decent mediocre 9-5 job in the mobile market as most will want iPhone or Android experience. The time you invest in your skills must have near maximum payoff, and it's not in WimPy7s.
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I would think developers that wanted to or were developing for webOS would be more inclined to focus more on Android over Windows Phone. The WebOS was already on the fringe and Windows 7 for the phone was already at their disposal of choice. So moving from WebOS to Windows is well yucky feeling.
That's a good point. Microsoft should come up with some sort of campaign to win these developers over. They could maybe even include free phones, dev tools, and training, etc.
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Well, it's a fair bit more complicated than that. You wouldn't necessarily want to write for a platform that has 15 apps just like yours, even if there are 20 times as many potential customers. It does sense to target a platform where you'd be unique.
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Oops, I actually mean "20 apps just like yours, even if there are 15 times..."
Hard for Android to compete with that (Score:2)
since their tools are free already.
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Nevermind. Ignore previous comment.
free phones, tools and training
Does one have to pay licensing costs to develop for WP7?
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The tools, including Express version of Visual Studio and a GUI-creation tool called Expression Blend, and an emulator, are already free. There's typically a $100 fee to publish apps to the marketplace - this is the same as on iOS, I believe (could be outdated info). That covers things like the cost of certifying apps for publication.
The phones are obviously not typically free, unless you get a good deal on a new two-year contract.
Why would they go anywhere? (Score:3)
The market share of WebOS has just gone ballistic. $99 a tablet - genius.
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From what I can see, most of the people who are snatching up the cheap TouchPads are developers/modders who realize:
Android will be ported to TouchPad well before the end of the year. HP's exit from the tablet market only damaged Motorola and Samsung tablet sales, and only for a short while. What they should learn from this is that they can't sell non-iPads tablets at iPad prices.
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with a large share of the people who bought them trying to figure out how to get webOS off of it.
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come to think of it - 250,000 webOS tablets sold means it has a larger market share than Windows Phone 7!
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Then in 10 years they'll dump it altogether for the next new thing and WP devs will be shocked, SHOCKED that the career they built around developing in a proprietary language for a walled-garden platform is going into the shitter.
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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.
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No, the mucking forons hired the CEO of Reebok to run Palm, who promptly declared that Palm's biggest asset is its brand, and hence, all $$ should be poured into marketing, and slashed R&D. That's why there was nothing after Palm Vx for a long time.
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Vale Palm :( I still have a IIIx from 1999, and a TE from 2003; sometimes I boot them up and am still amazed at the speed of those things, with almost all software opening instantly -- Palm got portables back in the day so much better than anyone else, and I sometimes feel that tech still hasn't caught back up to where we were a decade ago. You shouldn't need 1GHz processors to do the same things Palm was doing with a 16MHz Dragonball ...
Personally, I feel that the failure to release Cobalt (not on time,
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You need them 1GHz processors now because the last few generations of programmers have forgotten what it means to program closer to the metal, using data structures, O(n), and better algorithms. I see it all the time at <insert some company that makes dvrs>.
Deadlines have pretty much forced the rest to half-ass code in to get it on time, or not risk putting in better code that would rock the "stability" boat. The rest want to use a "managed" language to program, and so there goes all the original spe
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Yes, Microsoft, the company that breaks compatiblity with its products all the time... *facepalm*.
I think you're thinking of Apple, and even they don't do it that much. I love FUD though.
Re:And... (Score:5, Insightful)
And then in two years we'll deprecate the existing API, change the language specs just enough to break your apps...
How was this comment modded insightful? If anything that Microsoft is criticized for is usually the opposite of what you claim. This is the first time I've ever heard complaints that Microsoft changes their API too frequently.
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Windows Phone 7 is a completely new OS, no support for previous version, focused on the consumer market.
Windows Embedded Handheld 7 I believe is the old Windows Mobile environment, and will be specific to handheld scanners etc, more Business orientated.
Also Silverlight is coming to Windows Embedded Handheld later next year.
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No Embedded 7 is now gone too: http://www.zdnet.com/blog/microsoft/windows-embedded-handheld-7-slips-off-the-microsoft-roadmap/9005 [zdnet.com]
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Right, windows 8 will be able to display HTML 8 documents and interpret javascript. You think that means they're tossing out
Re:Microsoft is really well positioned here (Score:4, Interesting)
This must mean you're the one person in 18 million who actually thinks Microsoft is going to make any significant penetration in the mobile market.
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This must mean you're the one person in 18 million who actually thinks Microsoft is going to make any significant penetration in the mobile market.
One of us is going to look back on this post in a few years and laugh and laugh...
One of us is ignoring history.
Hint: I've been paying attention.
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So have I. When Microsoft steps outside its traditional Windows-Office domain, all it does is throw vast amounts of money with little enough return.
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Are you factoring in strategic value or just pure cash? Microsoft wants a living room play. They want to be a player in entertainment. Now they are, and they have a year over year profitable division executing it. That's worth more than only what's on the balance sheet.
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One of us is ignoring history.
Hint: I've been paying attention.
What? You mean, like Microsoft's previous successful forays into the mobile world??
If MS is successful with WP7, it will be in spite of history, not because of it ...
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Silly. First, how many people are actually thinking about the topic at all? I'll make up a statistic just as imaginary as yours: 1 in a million. So, our stats being equal in validity, 1 in 8 think Microsoft will be successful, right? (rhetorical)
Second, he said "there's a very real possibility" - that's his CYA qualifier, and thus he isn't necessarily saying they *will* just that they *might* gain market share. He didn't say what "very real" means (1%? 10%? 50%?) or how much market share (1%? 10% 50%?).
It's
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This is a move on desperation on MS's part. I don't see it as a smart move, because it will be ineffective. First, I doubt there were many "dedicated" WebOS developers, especially for a platform with such a small market. For example, I develop games for iOS and Android jointly, I'm not "dedicated" to any platform. Second, any outfit that is looking to start over from scratch will look at the big, profitable markets. Free hardware is a drop in the bucket. Selling software is what matters, and the WP7 m
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.
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I see you are impressed by cheap ui parlor tricks.
Not at all. Just observing they have a distinctive look, and they have been improving the system underneath. WP7 is (unlike many other things they have done) very solid at the core.
And the OEMs will see through the smokescreen. The MicroNokia partnership does not a fair windows phone playing field make.
It is a fair point that Nokia has a slightly closer relationship - but it's wholly its own company, in a way Google/Motorola very obviously is not. If you
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I'm only here to tell you what will happen; you are of course free to carry on blissfully ignorant of larger currents beneath you.
See this [wikipedia.org].
Further reference (Score:2)
See this [google.com]
You cannot see until you are willing to look around.
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What cheap parlor tricks are you referring to? You mean trying to make a UI look cool by slathering on gradient fills? Oh wait, that's Android and iOS.
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That's for sure. I'm fairly well convinced that unless Nokia keeps Symbian, or uses another OS, they are doomed to faik. Nokia's hardware is second-to-none(I've dropped my N900 about 100 times from 4' onto a variety of surfaces, and it keeps working with barely a scratch), yet their software division seems to be going down hill. And *noone* wants WP7.
If MS went the way that made Windows successful - totally open ecosystem, cheap/free tools, apps written for one machine run anywhere, loads of customization i
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The only nightmare was the lack of platform performance certification. MS was totally asleep at the wheel at the end letting HTC ship into production debugging DirectDraw drivers as "gold master" drivers. Just ask Don Couch about this.
IF MS had thrown Chassis requirements at WMobile instead of letting the OEMs do whatever they wanted, then it wouldn't have been so fragmented.
Android is walking this road, but at least the OEMs aren't half-assing the hardware as they used to (2.8" screens from HTC with partia
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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".
3) Nokia WP7 phones starting to come online soon.
Note that these two points contradict one another.
Sounds like a classic case of wanting to eat their cake and have it too.
Not much of a contradiction (Score:2)
Note that these two points contradict one another.
Not really. Nokia is still totally a separate company, they obviously got some breaks in licensing or something else to develop WP7 phones - but they are still independent and can only expect limited support from Microsoft.
Plus, any other handset maker declaring complete allegiance to Microsoft could probably expect similarly favorable terms. Rather than being a warning, think of it as looking like a model example of signing on to the franchise.
When Nokia
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Microsoft is an OS manufacturer. They do not own a hardware company. If you are a phone manufacturer, you receive no direct competition from Microsoft but only from Nokia backed by Microsoft
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Right, because Microsoft really needs to hammer HTC, LG, and Samsung out of the market. That would be so righteous and genius of them.
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Who has forgotten... (Score:2)
Subjective opinions do not facts make. Try again?
That wasn't a fact. It was an observation. Try again, indeed. Learn to discern what is being written is more like it. ...so long as you forget that Nokia exists, the same Nokia who has preference over anyone else, including independent devs. And also this requires forgetting Microsoft's entire history.
Nokia only has a slight preference over other vendors. What is to stop Microsoft from making a similar deal with any other vendor who chooses to drop Androi
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Windows Phone is not like Windows Desktop ... I don't like to normally use either, but at least I know they are very different (for the time being...we'll see what Windows 8 does.)