Microsoft builds a Windows Phone 7 developer platform, but will the coders come?
In the PC world, vendors used to say that the hardware and operating system were far less important than the number and variety of applications available for a given platform. (With Web apps’ popularity growing, that adage probably is less true than it used to be.) In the mobile phone world, however, applications still matter. A lot.
The Windows Phone 7 team is fully aware of this and has been spending plenty of time and money, especially since March 2010, to target developers of all stripes. The company has lots of irons in the fire: Contests, roadshows, code camps — supposedly even coughing up cash to get iPhone and Android developers to create versions of their applications for Windows Phone 7.
For some (possibly many) phone developers, the decision as to whether to create apps for a particular platform is first and foremost about money. If they think they have an idea that will make them overnight (or at least, over a few years) millionaires , why not? Part of that financial calculation also revolves around the kinds of tools available to them as developers and how steep a learning curve they are anticipating, since development time and energy has to be figured into their equations.
