MIX10: Mobile and Web Developers Gather for Windows Phone 7 Preview
At MIX10 in Vegas this week, Microsoft began broadly engaging developers to begin supporting its newest mobile platform through its mature evangelism machine, and the message was pretty clear for developers of games and digital media: Microsoft is finally providing you a mobile platform consumers should enjoy.
There was a lot for the audience to like about the Windows Phone 7 Series application platform, primarily because it was a highly biased crowd, who by attending the show already declared themselves to be interested in Microsoft technologies like Silverlight, XNA, and Visual Studio. And since Windows Phone 7 requires ISVs to use one of these development platforms, it should be fairly easy for interactive designers and game developers to port existing code to the mobile OS.
This approach gives Microsoft the opportunity to leverage a fairly robust Xbox community of developers and position Microsoft to challenge Apple's iPhone within the social gaming segment. Although games represent the largest revenue-generating category of app downloads, Apple does not produce a home gaming console to compete with Xbox.
In the past, developers have faced challenges with how hardware OEMs have commercialized Windows Mobile, often adding proprietary user interface frameworks, like HTC's TouchFlo, or designing hardware that stretches the operating system's performance. Being able to design one user experience that consistently and elegantly across all Windows mobile devices was next to impossible given the fragmentation that was created by Microsoft's OEM partners all trying to differentiate their Windows devices. However, MIX10 presenters made it clear that Microsoft intends to quash major attempts to distinguish Windows phones from carrier to carrier and OEM to OEM. As Charlie Kindel, the Partner Group Program Manager on Windows Phone developer experience team at Microsoft, pointed out in his session at Mix, "Our goal is to give you as developers a very common target."
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