So Much Wit

Sebas­t­ian Anthony, report­ing at Down­load Squad:

Can Apple really see them­selves com­pet­ing, with a minus­cule desk­top mar­ket share and 25% of the smart­phone sec­tor? Steve Jobs has announced Apple’s intent to move into mobile gam­ing, but can you really see devel­op­ers sid­ing with the iPhone when Win­dows Phone 7 is just around the corner?

(Via Dar­ing Fire­ball).

Yes, I really can see. You know what the killer fea­ture of the App Store is? That shiny “Buy Now” but­ton next to each app.

The App Store has its prob­lems, and I cer­tainly think that hav­ing some com­pe­ti­tion out there for it would do every­one loads of good. But Anthony seems to be sug­gest­ing in his piece that game mak­ers will sud­denly eschew an estab­lished, laser-​​focused plat­form with direct access to a solid chunk of the smart­phone mar­ket. All because Microsoft is com­ing out with a new OS some­time this year — maybe — that no one has really used, and that no phones cur­rently support?

Right.

The WPS7 or what­ever looks cool, and I hope that it does well and moti­vates Apple to stop being so developer-​​hostile. But the fact is the the iPhone exists today, and you can develop for it today, and make money off of Apple’s exist­ing cus­tomer base. If it were any other prod­uct, it’d be the same story: com­par­ing ship­ping prod­ucts to vapor­ware like this is just nonsense.

P.S. Googling around to check on the sta­tus of Win­dows Phone 7 Series (that name will never get eas­ier to type) revealed a num­ber of other extremely valu­able, bril­liantly insight­ful pieces of jour­nal­is­tic acu­men, such as this bit by Nicholas Kolakowski at eWeek: Microsoft’s Win­dows Phone 7 Series Could Draw Con­sumers, Says Ana­lyst. Trans­la­tion: Peo­ple Might Buy This New Thing That Will Be Avail­able For Pur­chase, Some­one Says. (In fair­ness, Kather­ine Egbert, the ana­lyst quoted in the arti­cle, does make a good point: Microsoft won’t give hand­set man­u­fac­tur­ers much room to cus­tomize the OS’s look and feel, which will make the brand much stronger and and the plat­form more con­sis­tent for devel­op­ers who want to tar­get it. This is a good move on Microsoft’s part).