Gadgetory

hey guys it's tom line from the verge and i'm here at microsoft's bill 2012 conference while it may have been raining a week Mike supposed to be trying to excite the crowds around Windows Phone and Windows the opportunity to transform the kinds of devices we build the kinds of applications that we create has never been better than it is today I've been at Microsoft since 98 I moved to phone back when it was Windows Mobile in 2004 you know 2007 happen 2007 was a sea change for the industry obviously we know what happened then with the iphone shipping and you know we we were not necessarily where we wanted to be at that point fast forward to march 2010 when we released the first version of Windows Phone you know a very different product one where we tried to focus first and foremost on the end-user experience what you're seeing now this has been an effort a concerted effort at least as old as Windows Phone 7 to try to move to one single underlying shared core operating system and that's that's the result of that is finally now Windows Phone 8 users who buy windows 8 are going to have their best phone companion experience by far on Windows Phone 8 we share the same name we share a lot of the same kind of applications we also share the same name for the storm I see is two efforts going on in parallel one we want to build a share code if people build new apps and invest in Windows and Windows Phone we also want to reduce their costs as they're targeting iOS and Android cuz they're going to target all of them and so we make it very easy especially with native code so you as you build a game or you the gaming engine you can do all the platforms including us on the same day if you reduce the cost of coming to the platform you reduce the time and then especially if you get middleware Havok's a middleware company we write middleware technology which runs cross platform from our perspective it was pretty straightforward to get our technology across for someone just getting into development I would think Windows Phone would be the easiest there's not a lot to to really live learn on the back end you can come in with an idea and you can make something quite good quite fast we won't been able develop it so they can write out you know as soon as possible we released the sdk these really studios available now they have you know the devices they need to test and write those apps I've been on an awful lot of platforms and iOS is really the one to be on for making apps at the moment hopefully with the changes in Windows Phone 8 that there will be a lot more potential to create great apps people went that when they go in and buy iphone aren't thinking about it feature X they're thinking about cost and familiarity as people see the surface and as people see the windows it which will be at their work and their new laptops and the devices that they normally have I think that people talk about the helo effect that can happen when people suddenly look at a windows phone and it feels familiar up to now Microsoft has had the quality in the OS but they haven't had that the user base to make it worthwhile for developers so unless a developer is in love with the platform itself they weren't really going to invest time and money in making a Windows Phone app we didn't have an experience with iOS and Android and we came from a kind of silverlight WPF background so I'm the transition to Windows Phone when it came out it was very natural for us and we also found that you know iOS and Android that are already so saturated and so Windows Phone was this new thing that it could it could be quite an opportunity to kind of make a name for ourselves in a very small market developers need to make money on our platform either by ads or by selling their applications or they own a service and they want to hit customers so in some cases really by just getting more eyeballs and with Windows and Windows Phone combines our ecosystem combines we believe we're creating this very very broad market where people are going to be your customers are going to be on our platforms and you'll get customers by supporting our platform so I met it's all about gat return you know on the investment we've had multiple developers that earn five even six figures a month on the windows for storm we've had some developers that you know barely make enough to you know buy a candy bar we're a team of ten ten people doing windows apps we don't do I a spindle downer we don't build websites we just build windows 8 and windows phone apps at the moment our primary goal is exposure and so we don't actually it's free our apps are currently free on the marketplace and the ecosystem isn't quite big enough yet for us to be able to monetize we have 46 out of the top 50 apps that are available on Android and iPhone today now that list is going to change in six months some of the apps are really popular out or may not be as popular this is not a journey that ends I think you're going to see games coming out on Windows Phone possibly even before you see them coming out on iOS and Android the reason being that when you build a game to run on a PC you're building it with directx in mind so it's going to be very fast to get again running on Windows Phone everything that we've seen so far speaks to a really strong conviction into the platform and from phone to surface to desktop we're on the same train tracks now and so that means that that we're going to hook our train together and get to be one train they used to always say Microsoft gets it on the third iteration and and so if you think about Windows Phone this is our third iteration and I feel like we actually have a product now that's no compromises I think this is Microsoft's first reboot and first in a long time to placed where their their unifying everything across the company I think for the first time they're they're realizing they have to play in a slightly different space than they've been working in so far and they're they're learning a lot from apple and they're building something that is really nice but it's not derivative which is also a nice change you