BusinessInsider reports that they have heard from multiple sources that Microsoft is paying companies up to $100,000 for bringing their app to Windows Phone.
This is on top of offers to pay $100 per app, up to $2000, if developers publish an app before the end of this month.
The two different price points reflect two different goals– the so call breadth and depth strategies.
Breath would be efforts to increase the absolute number of apps in the Windows Phone store. With Windows Phone having 145,000 apps and experiencing a significant slow-down recently in submissions, such incentives are necessary to convince developers to create apps for the 30+ million odd Windows Phone users, rather than the 600 million iOS users or billion Android users.
At the same time the depth strategy is to ensure important high profile apps such as Instagram comes to the platform. Microsoft often provides direct assistance to some companies and develop apps using their own 3rd party developer, and merely require companies to provide APIs and resources.
Of course even with that level of assistance some companies are still resistant – Google for example has, despite approaches, for strategic reasons not supported Windows Phone, and Instagram has so far proven reluctant.
While some may argue bribing developers is cheating, this is exactly the level of support I expect Microsoft to provide for the ecosystem, and of course Google and Blackberry both used the same strategy in their early years.
In fact we hope Microsoft is even more liberal with the money and hire some companies to create exclusive, high profile games for Windows Phone, with the recent Halo game a good example of what the platform needs.
No comments:
Post a Comment