
Microsoft to Developers: Windows Outsells Android, iOS, OS X Combined - Pr0
http://thenextweb.com/microsoft/2012/12/10/microsoft-ad-woos-devs-by-touting-more-windows-licenses-than-android-ios-and-os-x-combined/?fromcat=all
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JonnieCache
Well then give us an API which isn't painful to use and give us confidence you
won't abandon it after a couple of years. Maybe fully committing to dogfooding
their APIs for the first time ever might inspire some faith. That's the real,
underlying reason mac products have such a good relationship with developers:
apple can't resist those meaty chunks. At least by comparison with MS.

Also, what percentage of those windows license sales represent an environment
where installing arbitrary software is even permitted by the computers owner?

I wonder, does microsoft have a vision for an app store in the enterprise? I
suppose one of the advantages of the sandboxing is it might lead to a
relaxation of the rules around installing other software on corporate
machines.

~~~
chc
I am not much of a Windows guy, but C#, .NET and the accompanying tools seem
pretty nice to me and have been supported about as long as Mac OS X. It's also
my impression that Microsoft has introduced fewer breaking changes into .NET
during that period — though again, that might just be a symptom of me being
more tuned into the Apple ecosystem. Was there anything similar to what Apple
did to Carbon developers a few years back, abruptly deprecating most of the
framework just a few months before an OS release?

And Apple has been accused of having the opposite problem — writing APIs just
for the "showcase" applications. Very often the first version of an API will
be great for recreating Apple's demos, but when you need to go past that, the
framework is either unhelpful or actually gets in your way. (I'd like to offer
some good examples, but they're eluding me at the moment. I know I've seen a
number of complaints along these lines on the Cocoa-Dev mailing list over the
years.)

IMO, the reason for Apple's good relationship with developers look more like
this:

• It's UNIX, which developers have always loved for fairly well-known reasons.

• Microsoft entered the last decade pretty much universally despised. Many
developers would flat-out refuse to work there, despite it being a hugely
successful company with generous compensation, just because association with
Microsoft was so very uncool.

• Apple sold boutique computers to consumers and professionals. People who
bought Apple computers were signaling "I actively seek out and pay for
experiences that I like better." This meant Apple's user base has generally
been disproportionately profitable for apps targeted at those markets.

• Related to the second point, Apple was the major alternative at a time when
technophiles wanted to get away from Microsoft. They could have gone to Linux,
but at the time Macs were just a bit more mature and "safe," particularly on
laptops.

~~~
beagle3
> C#, .NET and the accompanying tools seem pretty nice to me and have been
> supported about as long as Mac OS X.

On the back end server, that's mostly true.

Microsoft has been playing the "here's a new API, we'll stop improving the old
one, and make relying on it foolish" treadmill for more than 15 years: MFC,
ATL, ODBC, ADO, DAO, Liquid, SilverLight, WPF, WinForms, VB6 -> VB.Net, DNA ->
ASP, ...

The world, up until a few years ago, was very happy to be on that treadmill. I
was always baffled by it, but I can understand the fashion and buzzword driven
resume IT world.

Except, something changed in the last 3 years: People are no longer as happy
with the Microsoft treadmill, and the cool kids started liking the stuff that
does not strictly depend on a corporate sponsor for advances and obsoleting:
Ruby [on Rails], Node.js, Clojure, and more.

I'm working on a project that's heavily invested in WPF, a decision that
seemed reasonable to the decision makers back in 2010, and it's a horrible
mess. There are resource leaks that have been reported as "won't fix until
next version" 3 years ago, but it was only a year ago that it became clear
there never will be a next version. (I have to manually call garbage
collection once every second or so, or the GUI freezes with no error or
explanation. Figuring that out was a few wasted days of debugging).

And WPF obsoleted WinForms; And silverlight was supposed to be a subset of
WPF, except they have a weird common subset that is useful for nothing, and a
lot of stuff I need was added to SilverLight, but not WPF, with the intention
of adding it to the next WPF that never came.

Oh, and SilverLight was abandoned too.

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nicholassmith
I have a slight issue with Microsoft saying 'look how many licenses we sold!'
As there's no direct way to know if they're talking about licenses in the
hands of consumers, or licenses sold by the yard to OEMS currently sat in a
box.

~~~
bntly
they always have and always will use that metric - it impresses the users. It
probably won't impress developers though.

~~~
nicholassmith
Probably not, at least when Apple says "Hey, we sold Xmillion copies of
Mountain Lion" you know that they're pretty much talking about how many people
have installed it. Same with Android and iOS when they talk about how many
activations they've seen, as a developer you instantly get the number of users
you're going to potentially have as an audience. Juicing the numbers is not
going to woo developers who can see right through it.

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sitharus
They don't give stats on corporate installs though, and I would bet that most
Windows licences are to corporates. I'd be willing to bet that the majority of
users aren't able to purchase their own software.

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Zirro
I realise that it may not seem very important in this context, but for being a
site aimed towards developers, and after all the HTML5-touting that the IE-
team has been doing, I was pretty disappointed to find that the site in
question (<http://www.generationapp.com>) uses the XHTML 1.0 Transitional-
doctype.

When even <http://www.microsoft.com> uses <!DOCTYPE html>, I fail to see why a
developer-focused site (with visitors who actually check the source code)
would not.

~~~
untog
Because in the real world, doctypes don't make any difference?

Don't get me wrong, I do understand where you are coming from- but when there
is literally no actual change aside from what the first line of the document
source looks like... I have a hard time getting too agitated about it.

~~~
toyg
_Because in the real world, doctypes don't make any difference?_

Really?
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quirks_mode#Comparison_of_docum...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quirks_mode#Comparison_of_document_types)

~~~
untog
OK, let me rephrase. "The HTML5 doctype and XHTML Transitional doctypes do not
make any meaningful difference".

Luckily, we are long past the days of quirks mode if we just remember to set a
decent doctype.

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codeka
The thing I don't get is, isn't the Windows App Store only available to
Windows 8? Microsoft definitely haven't sold a billion licenses to Windows 8,
so where does that claim come from?

~~~
felipeko
This is just a PR gamble with the numbers. They are saying for the past 2
years.

And that probably means that Android outsold Windows this year, or else they
wouldn't have used "last 2 years". Going by Android's growth rate and Windows'
saturation, i would say this is a good guess.

~~~
azakai
It's even worse. Look at slide 24 in

[http://www.avc.com/a_vc/2012/12/mary-
meekers-2012-internet-t...](http://www.avc.com/a_vc/2012/12/mary-
meekers-2012-internet-trends.html)

for the overall trend. Counting all computing devices - PCs, smartphones,
tablets (and that's what matters in the app market) - Windows used to have 95%
of that market, but iOS and Android are quickly reducing that and the Windows
figure is now 35%.

The last time Windows had such low market share was around 1984. But then
Windows was rapidly rising, today it is rapidly declining.

~~~
jimbokun
That is an amazing slide show!

Stuff I kind of sort of already knew, but numbers and charts really bringing
home the magnitude of some of the changes, challenges, and opportunities in
front of us.

------
kyllo
"Over the last 2 years, more Windows licenses have been sold than Android,
iOS, and Macs combined."

So they're using total sales of all their desktop and mobile OS licenses
combined for the past two years as a basis of comparison? And they're
including the corporate licenses and OEM bundles?

I wonder how many of these total sales were to individuals who actually had a
choice of OS?

The data might be true, but is deeply misleading as far as portraying the
actual market trend.

~~~
untog
_I wonder how many of these total sales were to individuals who actually had a
choice of OS?_

I'm not sure it matters, for their purposes. They are people running Windows
for developers to target, how they came to do so is largely irrelevant.

~~~
AnthonyMouse
It could be pretty significant. If a strong majority of Windows users are in
corporate environments where they're not permitted to install software, every
developer who doesn't produce the sort of software purchased by corporate IT
departments will have no access to that user base.

~~~
kyllo
Yes, that, and also another factor (although still a relatively small slice of
the market) is the people who buy machines with OEM bundled Windows and then
just install some form of Linux on it to use instead. Those people aren't
going to be consuming any Windows "apps" either, but they would be counted in
Microsoft's total.

Basically, it's an empty boast intended to obscure the fact that Windows is
losing market share incredibly fast.

------
cpdean
I wonder how inflated the license count is from the armies of corporate
machines where users can't actually install any app that a potential windows
developer writes.

~~~
tsotha
That's a good point. If you come up with the Next Big Thing it will never get
installed on my Windows box at work unless the company wants to use it (which
isn't very likely).

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jayfuerstenberg
Well since there are no real numbers cited we have no way of fact checking
them.

Slide #24 of this presentation offers a more telling picture of where Wintel
is headed: [http://www.slideshare.net/kleinerperkins/2012-kpcb-
internet-...](http://www.slideshare.net/kleinerperkins/2012-kpcb-internet-
trends-yearend-update#btnNext)

(Spoiler, it isn't pretty)

------
maak
"The problem is that it clearly wasn’t created by developers"

I would shudder to think what an ad developed by developers would look like..

~~~
kyllo
I'm guessing that one for Microsoft would include footage of Ballmer screaming
"Developers! Developers! Developers!" just for the lulz.

------
Zenst
It is a rather brash statement when you look at all those platforms and
realise they can all run HTML5 and java. So if I was a devloper and given the
processing power now afforded even the average lowest sample in the combined.
Well I'd look at the advantage of portability along with removing so much of
the platform specifics. So in this situation It would totaly make that the
original argument leveriged by Microsoft in this article void.

You could say that most platforms are more powerful than most users actualy
needs and use and again end up thinking HTML5/java. Now backend/server wise
type applications, now that is another question all together.

~~~
EwanG
Or, you could take a look and notice that Javascript is now supported by
Visual Studio, write an app for the Windows 8 Store, turn around and use Phone
Gap to port it to Android (rather easy) and iOS (somewhat more difficult), and
then see which platform actually drives the most sales for you.

Then again, it could just be me being greedy :-)

------
DigitalSea
Microsoft do make some very valid and to an extent accurate arguments in the
advertisement. While the true number of consumer licences will probably never
be revealed, you can't argue that it's still probably a very high number once
you subtract OEM vendor licence purchases and enterprise licences. I don't
doubt a lot of those licences are sitting on the shelves of computer stores,
but I also don't doubt that the uptake of Windows 8 is pretty high and given
that it has only been one month, those metrics are pretty impressive
regardless of the truthfulness behind them which works in Microsoft's favour
because people are suckers for numbers.

Windows 8 is Microsoft's best shot at infiltrating the lucrative app store
market. Having used the preview version of Windows 8 for sometime, I've grown
to like the OS and think the app store model within the operating system has
potential. The issue with Microsoft is that they don't stick to their laurels,
they build something and support it for a couple of years and then phase it
out leaving developers in the cold. Give us easier tools, give us a decent
API, provide better support and give us some assurance and then Windows 8 will
truly be a success. They're on the right track streamlining the experience
between XBOX, mobile device, tablet and desktop at least.

------
smegel
And _desktop_ developers have always targeted Windows. What's the big deal?

------
maak
Can anyone comment on how good cross version development is on Windows? If
tools are available to minimize the overhead of cross-platform development in
this regard, then I don't see why the ad should be viewed in such a negative
light.

~~~
voltagex_
Cross version or cross platform?

I can potentially write a Win32 desktop app that runs on XP, 7 and 8.

Metro apps can be used on 8 and RT, with a potential port to Windows Phone 8.

------
wololo
OS share slide from Mary Meeker's presentation last week showing that changing
rapidly:
[http://static2.businessinsider.com/image/50bd70c96bb3f73b0e0...](http://static2.businessinsider.com/image/50bd70c96bb3f73b0e000006-900/.jpg)

~~~
markrages
That slide directly contradicts the article's headline.

~~~
wololo
<http://www.paulgraham.com/submarine.html>

------
mtgx
The fact that Windows 7 has sold well is completely irrelevant for the
Microsoft store developers, right now, especially if Windows 8 continues
selling very poorly.

Also _right now_ Android is selling faster than Windows has ever sold, and
growing. The reason it hasn't sold as many as Windows "in the past 2 years" is
because its growth rate was much slower back then, and so it was for iOS. But
both iOS and Android EASILY beat Windows 8 in sales right now. It's not even a
contest.

~~~
rjd
Except the numbers Microsoft have been throwing about say Windows 8 is
outselling Windows 7. The key is if it continues to sell well, chances are it
will thanks to OEM deals.

Anecdotally a large percentage of people I know have upgraded, I'm well of
aware of this due to discussions about (both negatie and positive) but using
it. Mostly negative TBH LOL.

~~~
mtgx
Microsoft has only given the numbers of what they sold to OEM's - not to
consumers. It's like with chip deals. You can order $1 billion worth of chips.
But if you can't sell them all to customers that's your problem. The
manufacturers ordered a lot of licenses. But so far, I haven't seen market
research companies say they did that well in the market with them. Guess we'll
see in the next quarter results, if they even give those numbers, and also
whenever Microsoft mentions when they sold new licenses, because I guess that
would mean the manufacturers ran out of the first 40 million.

------
ianstallings
For now.

