The developer angle to your great idea is that devs need a reason to believe the users will come. Right now, they only see MS building a sturdy platform which will more than match the tools that Apple provided in 2007. There is no incipient tidal wave of excitement for the WinMo Total Package, so developers should project likely sales with only the edgy UI as a plus. Any developer — say, a startup doing the next Yelp-like social app that is how the world has moved beyond Web 2.0 (remember that quaint term?) — should make an effort-per-user calculation that puts WinMo as its third priority. At best.

Paul doesn’t discuss one VERY important aspect of developing: getting paid for one’s work. Any decent app takes a lot of time away from family or other opportunities; you have to believe it will be rewarded. Even tho I’m an ex-developer, I am astonished at the silence from Redmond about why their work will be the Next Great Thing, better than all others. Logical interpretation: it won’t, that’s why.

Also of note: there is a fairly short list of smartphone efforts since Palm invented the category in 2002. Even if Apple didn’t change the rules, but rather caught the wave at the perfect moment, MS has to look at Palm falling flat on its face with both Cobalt and WebOS; at Symbian^3 being abruptly aborted and an awkward science experiment entering its its place; at the near-panic at RIM to hold anything like its dominant place. Yes, it’s a huge market, but the MS efforts look a LOT more like the efforts at the failures than the successes. I think WinMo is Ballmer’s third envelope.

I think he’s saying that the Windows OS ecosystem has a vast breadth and depth, including information resources like Channel 9 and CodePlex, related technologies both large and small, and much more. And he’s right. There are a LOT of resources out there in support of Windows and related tools and technologies. A whole lot, much more than is available for any other platform ecosystem, including any Apple ecosystem. That’s not a statement on the goodness or badness of Apple technologies, it’s a statement of the breadth of supporting resources. It wasn’t bashing.

I also took user to mean a developer, a true user of the platform. If I were an Apple developer and hadn’t had a reason to delve into the wealth of supporting content for Windows developers, I probably wouldn’t realize just how vast it is. Again, not bashing.

Your take on his comments was so different from my own I had to go back and re-read his post. Turns out I jumped to conclusions about what he meant, since it’s not what he actually wrote, but I don’t think my interpretation is wrong.

[I’m thinking of the way that MS developers have largely rejected MS efforts to push them towards MVC frameworks, and also the push back on Visual Basic (we don’t want your OO language). C# and even .NET apps still aren’t the norm on Windows.]

I’m not sure about that. Right now, frameworks like MVC, MVVM are hot topics within the developer space, and most programming jobs require C# experience in some day. There may not be a lot of commercial development work going on in C# (although major portions of Visual Studio 2010 were written in WPF/C#), but there are a fair number of applications.

However, VS is overall still more solid, IMO. The debugger is noticeably better and if you work a lot with C++, so is the built-in editor. I think build-times are generally much better too (that really a compiler rather than IDE issue), but given that the input (e.g., header files) is different, it’s an apples-to-oranges comparison (also, Microsoft’s ISO C++ conformance is still pathetic whereas g++ 4.x is among the better C++ implementations).

To my earlier point, it’s one thing to make an Xbox 360 game. It’s another to make one that works on both Xbox 360 and Windows Phone. And then another to make one where you can “continue” a play session in the 360 version when you started in WP (or vice versa).

This is a great capability, and one that sets WP apart from the iPhone or anything else. But it’s not “free.” There’s still work to be done.