Windows Phone 7 secret sauce: developers, developers, developers
Windows Phone 7 is entering a tough market. Apple's iOS and Google's Android have become well-entrenched, widely used platforms, and both have application stores boasting tens or hundreds of thousands of applications.
Context & Ripple Effects
Microsoft has been telegraphing this play since March 2009, when it laid out its developer strategy for the next generation of Windows phones — a full eighteen months before launch, an unusually long runway aimed squarely at getting tools and revenue terms into coders' hands early. The reason is arithmetic: by August 2010, Apple's App Store and Google's Android Market already hold tens to hundreds of thousands of applications each, and Windows Phone 7 ships with neither that catalog nor an installed base.
The strategic problem the Ars Technica piece frames is that on modern smartphones the app store, not the handset spec sheet, is the product — Apple demonstrated this with the App Store's expansion of what a cellphone does, and both incumbents have turned catalog depth into a moat a newcomer must cross before consumers will even consider switching.
First-order effects
- Independent developers face a three-way allocation decision for the first time since the iPhone launched: whether to port effort to a third platform with zero users, or wait until Marketplace traction justifies the build cost.
- Apple and Google now compete for the same developer hours against a Microsoft offering better tooling terms, forcing both incumbents to defend their catalogs rather than just accumulate them.
Second-order effects
- Monetization becomes the recruiting battleground: Apple's iAd, which drew favorable early reviews from first advertisers Unilever and Nissan plus app makers such as Dictionary.com, shows that ad revenue — not just app sales — is part of what Microsoft must match to pull developers over.
- Handset makers and carriers choosing which OS to ship must weigh Windows Phone 7's thin catalog against differentiation from the Android field, pressuring Microsoft toward launch-day volume targets to keep partners committed.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, mobile OS competition consolidates into an ecosystem race where catalog size gates consumer adoption, consumer adoption gates developer interest, and platforms that fall behind the loop struggle to re-enter it — leaving room for only two or three viable app ecosystems.
- A third-platform entrant that cannot close the app gap through native development alone would eventually face pressure toward compatibility plays — running rivals' apps — as a shortcut past the cold-start problem.
The trend: Smartphone competition is shifting from hardware and OS features to developer-ecosystem scale, where app-catalog depth decides which platforms stay viable.