Lets just clear a few misconceptions up.
1) It does not take “MONTHS” to get permission to sell an application. This is a flat out lie. Typical approval for a new application to be sold via the AppStore is 2 weeks. This does vary based on number of submissions etc, but its a 2 week window, not months.
2) As to developers, developers are people, they are looking to make money and they go where the money is, period.
3) MS Store for phone is a wasteland, because there is no money to be made there. Don’t believe me? Simply ask why Angry Birds skipped the platform? They had a certified hit, making over 50Million in gross sales in just a few weeks and they completely skipped MS.. because they knew the effort for the reward wasn’t there.
4) Visual Basic was probably the worst piece of crap ever unleashed in the development arena. BASIC stands for Beginners All-purpose Symbolic Instruction Code. MS doing what they did with VB set out gobs of developers who really had no clue what they were doing and to this day caused more headaches than its worth. In a world where OO was clearly the movement, MS ensured that junk code would live on for decades.. Thank you for that MS. Thank you.
5 The single greatest thing Apple has done, is not the iPhone, it is indeed the app store. As a software developer and vendor who has sold software for well over 20 years the App Store made selling and distributing your app simple as pie. That is what revolutionized and commoditized software! Prior to the app store existing, you wanted to sell software, you needed to get bogged down in minutia that had nothing to with your software... Get a vendor account set up with your bank and a credit card company, (or paypal account) pay all fees, deal with chargebacks, fraud, distribution issues, etc etc etc.. It was a pain in the but. Apple offloaded all of that, and for 30% of the gross, you can simply publish your app and deal with marketing it.. nothing more.. as someone who did all the rest of that crap for years, It was a bargain. I can now not waste my time and energy on that nonsense, and just focus on making solid software and marketing.
MS moving into tablet is interesting, and certainly idea of buying 1 machine that is both.. MONITOR is the tablet and the computer .. could be a game changer, since spending $400-$500 for one device that can be both is a monetary incentive for them.. still though if they aren’t usable WHO CARES.
The tiles interface for windows is a fustercluck, it certainly will get adoption and could shift the market, but I really don’t know how much. Tablets and even Laptops have to be compact, effective, light, etc. The idea of lugging around a 15 or 17 inch monitor that is also your tablet and weighs in a multiple lbs I don’t think is going to be enticing to many people.
Its going to be interesting to see how this goes, MS’s bread and butter has always been the enterprise, and frankly they are incredibly late to the game to stem the opening of this market. The BYOD model is being adopted by even the staunchiest of industries, as it is a huge economic boon for them.. let the employee use their own thing rather than us spending $500 each to buy something for them... this means the argument to adopt a single solution isn’t what it once was.
I do agree that MS arrival could change the landscape, but the reports about this interface are almost entirely negative... and that’s a problem. USEABILITY is key... and a huge learning curve and reliability problems won’t help MS in this space.
Just like Android can do more low level things than iOS lets you do, yet apple owns the tablet market and is the single biggest hardware smartphone seller, bar none.
The day of the geeks driving consumer and even to a lesser extent enterprise tech are over. The typical person expects usability simple and intuitive... Obviously there are niche’s where this doesn’t apply.. but the typical user wants to do what they want without a huge curve... and I don’t think MS is there.
I’d like to observe one more thing:
I LIKE the fact that Apple takes a couple weeks to give someone permission to sell an app in AppStore. Wanna know why? Because in those few weeks, Apple is checking out the app, and more importantly, they’re checking out WHO WROTE IT.
This is a security detail that most people are overlooking. One of the problems with the shareware/freeware ethos in software is that the vast majority of the people downloading and running apps don’t have the technical know-how to detect an app that is going to steal your credentials, run up your phone bill or data bill. They have no idea who is actually behind most of these apps. They have no idea what the app is actually doing on their computer or phone.
Apple’s investigation into the app and the developer is a Good Thing[tm] IMO.
As for Visual Basic: I rather agree with you. The problem is, there is a demand on the desktop for a scripting/programming language that can create macros for Office, scripts for repetitive tasks on the OS, etc. Microsoft has had little to do with any of the scripting or interpreted programming languages that have come out in the last 10+ years, and they have a huge NIH syndrome going on there.
re: the App Store. I agree with you vehemently. People who have never written s/w don’t know that there are hundreds of thousands of clever, smart and eager s/w developers out there who can’t get their apps noticed and don’t want to just give them away as shareware/freeware. The real barrier to starting up a s/w company isn’t the brainpower to create a good app out of a good idea - it’s the marketing, sales and support issues that come into view when you finally ship. In some startups I’ve worked at, when we were writing the s/w, there were three of us engineers... and when we finally shipped, the company grew to nine people overnight, and the other six people were all of sales/marketing/support/accounting/shipping. Literally in the space of two months, we had to hire all those non-technical people.
With the App Store, a bunch of those people aren’t needed. It’s sheer genius that really understood the s/w market.