Now how did Microsoft make 100k apps magically appear in three months? It helps if they already exist.
A Microsoft vice president raised a few eyebrows among the tech punditocracy when he said there would be 100,000 apps for Windows 8 within 90 days after the operating system launches on October 26.
In an interview with Beet.tv, Keith Lorizio, vice president of U.S. sales and marketing at Microsoft, said the company is “expecting to aggressively pursue 100,000-plus apps in the first three months” Windows 8 is available and that Microsoft is “putting millions of dollars against that effort.”
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He’s not kidding about the latter. Forbes reports Microsoft will spend between $1.5 billion and $1.8 billion to promote Windows 8 for both PCs and tablets. Christmas has come early for some ad agencies.
If I was in a more cynical, snarky mood, I’d point out that Windows 7 needed nowhere near such a blitz because the pent-up anticipation was such that people couldn’t wait to get their hands on it. Oh wait, I just did.
We know Microsoft has the $1.5 billion to spend on ads, but where are they going to get the 100,000 apps? Some bloggers have suspected the company will cheat and count Win32 apps among the collection, but I think it’s something else: the Windows Phone marketplace.
Windows Phone 7 was a very nice revitalization of a dying phone OS. But it meant developers had to throw everything out and start over from scratch, and unfortunately, it’s already obsolete because Windows Phone 8 changes things again. Still, it has clawed its way from zero to 110,000 apps in about a year thanks to developer enthusiasm. WP7 doesn’t have a lot of developers or users, but those who do use it love it.
Microsoft is on record as saying that Windows Phone 7.x apps will run on Windows Phone 8 without requiring a recompile. Also, Windows 7.x apps are written to adjust their screen size, so they aren’t locked to one resolution. Have you ever run an iPhone app on the iPad and saw a small, 3.5″ app in the center of that 9.7″ panel? That won’t happen on Windows 8 tablets.
Once you port to Windows 8, that’s where the fun begins. A developer told me that since migrating his WP7 code to Windows 8, he now has one code base, and Visual Studio 2012 generates a separate app for Windows Phone 8, Windows RT and Windows 8-x86. He also said the migration from 7 to 8 was trivial.
So this could be Microsoft’s key to getting such an ambitious number of apps so quickly. It is counting on existing Windows Phone 7 apps to be quickly ported to 8 and then quickly across all platforms. So long as developers target the Windows 8 platform and libraries and not the underlying hardware, Visual Studio will handle the rest and one code base can cover the entire ecosystem.
I’m still not sold on Windows 8 and would only put it on my test machine if Microsoft offered me a copy. But I have to say they sure did a good job of linking all the platforms and making the process of migration as seamless as Sun promised with Java 15 years ago.
