Microsoft offers webOS developers free Windows Phones and dev tools
Microsoft is offering webOS developers free Windows Phone devices and dev tools. — Brandon Watson, Senior Director of Windows Phone 7 development at Microsoft made the offer in a twitter message on Friday.
Context & Ripple Effects
Microsoft's pitch to webOS developers, made by Brandon Watson on Twitter, is the second free-device giveaway aimed at its developer community this year — Nokia offered developers a free E7 alongside a WP7 device back in February — and it extends a seeding strategy Microsoft has used before, including putting handsets in the hands of 89,000 of its own employees in October 2010.
The move builds on the developer-first playbook Microsoft laid out as far back as its 2009 next-generation Windows phone developer strategy: an app catalog is only as strong as its third-party titles, and webOS developers — suddenly without a committed hardware path — are exactly the pool a third-place mobile platform wants to convert cheaply.
First-order effects
- Displaced webOS developers get hardware and tooling at zero cost, cutting the marginal expense of porting their apps to Windows Phone 7 to little more than engineering time.
- Microsoft's Windows Phone marketplace gains a direct pipeline of experienced mobile app makers at the moment their current platform's future is uncertain.
Second-order effects
- Rival platforms are pulled into an escalating subsidy contest for developer mindshare — Nokia has already run the same play, so free hardware becomes table stakes rather than a differentiator.
- Developer-relations budgets shift from conferences and marketing toward outright hardware grants, raising the cost floor for any ecosystem trying to close an app-catalog gap against iOS and Android.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, mobile OS competition increasingly runs through developer-acquisition economics — platforms win third-party catalogs by absorbing switching costs themselves rather than waiting for organic adoption, a structural shift that favors players with deep cash reserves.
The trend: Mobile platforms are buying developer mindshare with free hardware and tools, turning developer recruitment into a subsidized land grab as smaller ecosystems race to fill their app stores.