Windows 8 Sales Hit 40 Million

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Windows 8 Sales Hit 40 Million; Will App Developers Follow The ...

Huffington Post-by Jason Gilbert-1 hour ago

With 40 million licenses accounted for, Microsoft has a strong case with ... Has Microsoft's announcement of 40 million Windows 8 sales ...

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Windows 8 Sales Hit 40 Million; Will App Developers Follow The Money?

Posted: 11/28/2012 4:55 pm EST

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This week, Microsoft announced that it sold a truly bananas 40 million licenses of Windows 8 in the new operating system's first month of availability.
Even though some unknown portion of those sales are to manufacturers like Dell and Hewlett-Packard -- who then have to convince consumers to purchase their laptops, desktops, hybrids and whatnots -- and even though certain analysts insist that this marks a "disappointing" debut for the new Windows, 40 million licenses in one month is still an incredible number.
To put it in context, the most iPhones Apple has ever sold in three months is 37 million, upon the release of the iPhone 4S in late 2011. Microsoft just topped that, by one measure, in slightly more than 30 days.

The eternal battle between Apple and Microsoft notwithstanding, this means in a practical sense that there are already a whole bunch of PC users on Windows 8, with many more coming once Christmas shopping ramps up this December. It raises a key question: Will the existence of all these users convince developers to actually start writing apps for Windows 8?
Here's why I ask: I've been using Windows 8 computers as both primary and secondary devices for more than a month now. I've got a Microsoft Surface (with five different keyboards of many different colors, for some reason), as well as two touchscreen Windows 8 laptops, from Toshiba and Asus. I've found the experience on all three machines to be satisfactory and smooth overall. But if I had to pinpoint the most glaring problem with the operating system currently, it would be the relatively barren Windows app store, which sorely lacks apps built specifically for the new Windows.
The barren cupboard that is the Windows Store is especially troublesome on the Surface, which runs a tablet-optimized version of Windows 8 called Windows RT and which cannot run apps developed for older versions of Windows.
And that's trouble, my friends: For the Microsoft Surface, and other Windows 8 tablets, there's no Facebook, and no Twitter apps; no Spotify or Rdio or Rhapsody; no decent support for Gchat, or Google Reader, or Gmail; no Temple Run or Words with Friends or Draw Something. And not only are some of those mammoth, must-have apps still missing, but there's also no high-quality alternatives (think TweetDeck, or Sparrow, or HootSuite) to fill the voids left by those glaring absences.
All you have are the Microsoft-built alternatives, like Xbox Music and the People app, which just cannot deliver the same comprehensive experience as more focused applications.
Will this change soon? With 40 million licenses accounted for, Microsoft has a strong case with developers to get crack-a-lacking on Windows 8 apps. And yet as clear as that argument seems, whether developers will actually respond with well-written, robust programs remains murky.
The hesitance of developers to commit resources to Windows Phone seems relevant here. Talking to Microsoft executives about the infamous lack of quality apps for Windows Phone over the past couple years, they always remained privately confident that once Windows Phone picked up meaningful market share, the great apps would follow. Windows Phone has still yet to gain a foothold (in America, at least), and the app situation on Windows Phone, though improving, still lags far behind that of iOS and Android.
Now, on Windows 8, we have exactly what those executives had hoped for: a glut of new users on the operating system just waiting for apps to become available in the Windows Store. Even StatCounter's conservative estimate of 15 million users on Windows 8 represents a consequential base of credit card-carrying computer owners.
"Developers are generally rational folks," Ina Fried of AllThingsD wrote recently. "They have limited time, and tend to focus their energy where the eyeballs and dollars are."
Now that there are tens of millions of eyeballs on Windows 8 -- and potentially an equal number of dollars -- will the Windows Store overflow with new apps, as "rational" developers flock to an underserved, uncompetitive land of opportunity? Or will the Windows 8 app store remain, as it does on Windows Phone, the Achilles' heel of Microsoft's huge new venture, that one overwhelming drawback which prevents the next 40 million PC owners from hopping on the 8 train?

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Windows 8 Sales Hit 40 Million; Will App Developers Follow The ...

I wrote about the fact that Microsoft actually could pull off an operating system that is cross platform in the end likely better than either Apple or Android through Google could simply because they have been building operating systems ongoing since around 1980 with MSDOS and then Windows. So, the bulk of their net worth has been in developing operating systems. This isn't as true with Apple or with Google. Apple has been developing technology and developed the mouse and user interface and Google has mostly specialized in being better able to research and to find things online and other things related to this. And then Apple simplified Operating Systems in a Zen kind of way. But in so doing also limited the capacity for customization. Then Android from Google made a free operating system which gave people more customization possibilities but also complicated the situation a lot for many users. So, now you have Apple users who like simplicity without dealing with antivirus problems and you have Android users who like the complexity of their operating system because of all they can do with it. And now you have Windows 8 through Microsoft which is learning from Apple and Android and now creating an operating system that works cross platform that now apple and Android and Google will learn from and create next cross platform systems as well. So, it is all very remarkable the way it's all going on into the future. 

Later:

I think the real problem Window 8 has is that Windows everyone has had since the 1980s. Also, Windows has never been really sexy as an operating system maybe since Windows 95 which to me was the last really big change they made. 

However, Microsoft is big enough to wait for the App makers or pay or subcontract their own APP makers to make their product more sexy too. So, I think if you give Windows 8 or it's next versions about 5 years we might see a very different market than now.

For example, though Apple is well loved it has never really survived well without Steven Jobs at the helm. When he left for a while it almost went out of business. So, it is possible that Apple might not survive the next five years and might have a similar experience to the makers of Blackberry during the last few years until their latest great phone experience they are releasing soon (I think it is called Blackberry 10). So, it remains to be seen whether Apple will weather losing Steven Jobs or not over 5, 10 years or more? Whereas I think Android (if it isn't sued to much for copyright infringement) might go on indefinitely by concentrating on the customization market through apps and other things.