[Mythrl]

I wouldn't call engineering your entire OS to be able to share code between devices as irrelevant, nor would I characterize it as something that is done for a quick marketing line.

Making this change likely involves significant capital cost investment that is not done lightly and without a great deal of forethought. You think it's a coincidence that this gets announced 2 days after the Surface (which is clearly a bridging device) and a week after leaks appears for a new XBox (what OS do you think that will run)?

This whole thing has pretty obviously been planned out a long time ago, and Microsoft are starting to lay down their cards to show their hand. And it's increasingly looking like they have been putting together a pretty strong hand.

[wtallis]

You're still missing the point that it's never premature to complain that a shipping mobile platform has too few third-party apps. It doesn't matter whether a platform is brand-new or two years old, having no apps is a real competitive disadvantage that will have the real-world effect of warding off potential customers, and no forward-looking statements about what will happen next year can make the problem go away. The only solution to the problem is to build a large app library. Microsoft may be well-poised to make the problem go away within the next two years, but in the meantime, their mobile offering will be lackluster.

[Mythrl]

I'm not missing the point. I just disagree that for the next two years their app offerings will be lackluster. And my reason for that disagreement is the fact that they are converging their platform to run on all systems (desktop, laptop, tablet, phone and console).

Keep in mind this change almost instantly increases the potential market a phone app developer can tap into because it will be available to desktop users as well. You've just gone from developing for WP7 users, to every Win 8 user. That is an order of magnitude increase. Add to that XBox users.

I think Microsoft will catch up much faster than most people anticipate.

Edit: Ok I will rephrase the premature thing: Experience of using the phone from 1 year ago is not a valid criticism of the ecosystem today. Even less so for a new ecosystem that is not going to be released for another 3-6 months.

[wtallis]

No matter how many different platforms developers can target with a Win8 Metro app, the starting number of third-party apps for that platform is zero. There are no current Windows 7 desktop or phone apps or XBLA apps that will run on a Win8 phone. In some cases, porting will probably be easier than it otherwise would be, but it's still going to take some work.

Any game that already runs on smartphones will need to replace OpenGL ES with DirectX, and any app that currently runs on a Microsoft platform will need to be re-designed to work on a touchscreen, and still probably also re-write the whole GUI to use Metro.

The best that Microsoft can expect with Win8 as they are currently planning is for the first several months of app releases to be hasty ports that get their platform some credibility but don't actually make it look better than the alternatives, with good apps starting to show up by the end of the first year. But there's no way they'll close the gap quickly with anything other than badly-ported apps.

And in the meantime, barring massive bribery/subsidies from Microsoft, the only people who will be buying Windows phones are "early adopters" who just want to play with something different. That crowd isn't big enough to fund direct competition with Android and iOS.