Windows Phone Thoughts - Daily News, Views, Rants and Raves

"After last week's news, I'm pleased to tell you that Windows Marketplace for Mobile has today reached another major milestone by adding support for Windows Mobile 6 and 6.1 devices. This is an especially proud day for Microsoft because it marks our fulfillment of the Marketplace vision that we put forth only 9 months ago at Mobile World Congress. Last week we expanded the Marketplace experience to the PC and updated the developer portal to include stronger anti-piracy protection features for developers. Today, Marketplace is delivering some great free new features that enhance and expand the Marketplace experience to even more Windows Mobile customers."

Windows Mobile Marketplace is now available for pre-6.5 phones as a download. While I suppose you could have gotten it on your phone prior to now... the release today is suited for older phones and official!

The illustration to the left is inspired by something I was told today: the forthcoming Windows Mobile Marketplace is going to be for Windows Mobile 6.5 phones only, not back-ported to Windows Mobile 6.1 and 6.0 phones. That's right - the millions and millions of Windows Mobile phones out there today (40+ million I'd say in the past few years alone) will not have access to this forthcoming software directory. Only people that buy brand new phones, or perhaps a tiny percentage that will get a 6.5 upgrade for their phone, will be able to access this. They might as well made it available only to unicorns - both are mythical at this moment in time.

The strength of a software platform comes in numbers. Being the only one in the world with a fax machine means it's useless. Developers are excited about the Marketplace because, for the first time, they'll have direct access to the customer and can easily offer their software to them. But that audience is going to be very small at first, when it should have been very large.

I've been using Apple's App Store lately on an iPod Touch I purchased specifically for this reason, and I've never seen anything so easy to use in my life - it makes the discovery and purchase of software incredibly fast and simple. I'll write more about that later, but the point is that Apple made the App Store available to not only new iPhone 3G owners, but first-generation iPhone owners, and owners of both first and second generation iPod Touch owners. For developers, that means millions and millions of customers that are only a few taps away from trying, and buying, their software. Overnight millionaires were made by the Apple App Store because Apple put it in front of so many customers at once. This is the right way to do it. Read more...