It has not been even a week for the announcement that was made by HP for discontinuing its webOS, but the software giant, Microsoft has taken up steps to grab this opportunity to lure the webOS developers in the Microsoft world. Microsoft is using various mediums to get the stranded developers who have been left out because of the discontinuance of webOS, may it be by offering to give training, developer tools or free phones. The offer was made by Microsoft’s director of developer experience, Brandon Watson.
Watson made this offer publicly for webOS developers. Twitter account of Watson had a tweet wherein he wrote, “To Any Published WebOS Devs: We’ll give you what you need to be successful on #WindowsPhone, incl. free phones, dev tools, and training, etc.,” All the developers who are interested in accepting the offer had an instruction to email him so that he could get in touch with a team member of Windows Phone. This would help a team member to help the developer accept the offer after they look into his case and even give him “personal attention.”
The offer made seems to be a goodwill gesture from Microsoft, but it might fall down to deaf ears in most of the cases as lack of developer interest had a major role to play in the downfall of webOS. This can noted because during the launch of the TouchPad, there where a total of 6,200 webOS apps. The count was still small as compared to 425,000 iOS apps, but the biggest problem was that out of these 6,200 apps, the optimization for the tablet was for just 300.
Talking about HP, there was an announcement on Thursday made by them wherein they had listed a number of things which included a few really bold moves. This could in fact have drastic effects or maybe a turnaround effect for HP. The company however regretted saying that its “tablet effect” did fall way below the expectations. It had given signs that it would look into a few strategic options which would be for the company’s PC sector.
TouchPad was hit badly and worse was when Best Buy reported that its inventory still had more than 90 percent still of the HP tablet. It was noted later on that a $100 million charge was taken by HP so that it could write off TouchPad’s inventory which was unsold.
Coming back to Microsoft’s point, Windows Phone 7 platform is not yet well set to fight Google’s Android and Apple’s iOS. There has already been an announcement earlier by Microsoft that its OS will have an update soon. Nokia had abandoned the Symbian platform for the phone coming out of Microsoft’s warehouse, Windows Phone 7. later this year one would even see Nokia’s first WP7 devices.
Steve Ballmer however had admitted that Windows Phone 7 device sales have gone from bad to worse, but he said that its been a year that WP7 has launched and that there would be a lot many improvements so that it can test the toughness of other phones with its competitiveness.