I was sitting with a dear friend, and we were talking about the new Windows Phone 7, and the how it compares with the competition (iPhone, Android and Blackberry; notice no mention of Nokia here), and the Apple App Marketplace was mentioned, then my friend suddenly asks: why doesn’t Microsoft have a Windows Marketplace, that would be a great idea?
My immediate reaction was; what the … ?! Microsoft does have a Windows Marketplace and has had one for quite a while now. When I told my friend this he asked, well, why doesn’t Microsoft market this place? Why did I never hear of it before?
To tell you the truth, his was a good question, and it took me some time to realize this; Microsoft really doesn’t market a lot of its work well, doesn’t it? I mean, I grew up hearing the words “Microsoft is nothing but a great big marketing machine” and “the marketing people at Microsoft created this image” and stuff like that, to the point where I started to believe it was true.
But it really isn’t true, not to this point anyway. Microsoft does have a big advertising budget, but IMHO that is only targeted to products it can sell, products like Windows, Office, SharePoint and Windows Phone 7. A lot of other products go unnoticed, simply because nobody knew they even existed. I mean, up until I told everybody, nobody knew Microsoft had their own free antivirus product you can install i.e. Microsoft Security Essentials; operative word is free here.
Other things Microsoft does that go unnoticed are success stories, did you know that MySpace uses SQL Server? As a matter of fact, 440 SQL instances, yes, four-hundred-and-forty instances. Not only that, the total data managed by SQL Server is a whopping 1 petabyte (1 petabyte = 1024 Terrabytes = 1,048,576 Gigabytes), with 130 million users, 300,000 new users every day and 4.4 million concurrent users at peak time. Try that on for scalability and stability!!
Back to the Microsoft Marketplace, not only does Microsoft have a marketplace for Windows, it has one for Office, Mobile and Xbox. Yes, that is correct, four! And here they are:
So you see, Microsoft really is a changed company, and not all for the worse either. What do you think?
Links:
3 comments:
Hi bashar,
Thanks for sharing such interesting info, but to be clear here i checked the links and as usual in Microsoft internet products nothing quite interesting here.
But come on this is not even 10% of App store for the following reason:
1- Mainly it sells only Microsoft Products.
2- It sells PrePackaged products from Large Companies such as Nero.
3- The idea of App Store is to involve the Developer more and more, as a direct vendor
3- How the @#@! i can add my product to Windows App store ??
Thanks,
Great post Bashar. The problem with your reasoning is that MS have truly distant themselves from their roots. While MS is known for Windows and Office, what really made MS such a compelling "platform" is developers like you. You could argue that .NET is the most powerful development platform on the market and you would be right. But .NET and its related technologies is truly made for the "corporate" developer rather than the freelancing/armature developer that flourished upto VB6.
Such corporate developers are working in big teams for companies that have marketing departments to market their application.
What about those VB6 developers?? mostly they were left high and dry.
Now we have school kids creating Apps for 1$ while us .NET developers are scratching our heads and wondering…what is going on ???
Moutasem, go to http://developer.windowsphone.com and start uploading your apps.
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