>Then on top of that, to me, one of the great structural pieces is we don't have with Windows is this problem of Mac OS/iOS. I'm not in some quest to say let me try and replicate Mac OS and iOS or iOS and Mac OS. We don't have the Chrome versus Android.
I love the direction Microsoft is going. I almost feel like this is a new company totally different from the Microsoft of the past. But I seriously disagree with this we are Windows mantra. Having two different operating systems one for desktop another for mobile is a no brainier. To date my favorite Windows is still 7. Frankly I don't see the point of WinRT in the desktop.
I think Windows Phone will never be able to compete with Android/iOS. But a good restart would be to make Windows Phone less restrictive (side loading) and to make the SDK compatible with Windows 7.
Having a core set of shared services and more importantly a code framework that works without specialised versions on every windows device is much, much appreciated from a developer perspective - but whether thats what he is talking about or actually a single version of windows that adapts to each device I am not sure. The latter seems like it would be very hard or even impossible to do, or at least do well.
That being said, yes please make the windows phone less restrictive :) I've developed for Android, iOS and WinPhone and the WinPhone with C# and VS is by far the friendliest, but absolutely hobbled for practical use by their insistence on going via the store. My clients are businesses, not joe public! Businesses want a single, easy to control deployment to all their devices via powershell or similar. They want to be able to test an app in a UAT deployment to test devices, not effectively require it to be in production before they can see something outside of the developers machine.
> I think Windows Phone will never be able to compete with Android/iOS.
I disagree.
A "one" Windows strategy where you can write for the desktop and automatically have a Phone, XBox etc app is incredibly compelling. It's going to mean developers will have this massive market. And it's a market that is far, far more lucrative. Why write an iOS app that you will sell for dollars when you could write one Windows app that sells for $30 on the desktop, $20 on HoloLens, $10 on tablet and $3 on Mobile. And having a truly intelligent cloud behind it ie. not just a dumb key/value store or Hadoop stack but rather deep analytics as a service e.g. predictive modelling etc will make Windows apps far more compelling.
You can really see where Satya is taking Microsoft and it's pretty damn exciting. And I would never bet against them especially in the cloud/analytics space right now.
I love the direction Microsoft is going. I almost feel like this is a new company totally different from the Microsoft of the past. But I seriously disagree with this we are Windows mantra. Having two different operating systems one for desktop another for mobile is a no brainier. To date my favorite Windows is still 7. Frankly I don't see the point of WinRT in the desktop.
I think Windows Phone will never be able to compete with Android/iOS. But a good restart would be to make Windows Phone less restrictive (side loading) and to make the SDK compatible with Windows 7.