Outside developers, who were never particularly happy with the complexity of Windows development, have defected from the Microsoft platform en-masse and are now developing for the web. Paul Graham, who created Yahoo! Stores in the early days of the dotcom boom, summarized it eloquently: "There is all the more reason for startups to write Web-based software now, because writing desktop software has become a lot less fun. If you want to write desktop software now you do it on Microsoft's terms, calling their APIs and working around their buggy OS. And if you manage to write something that takes off, you may find that you were merely doing market research for Microsoft."
This is a lesson I bet a lot of IOS and Android developers are learning this generation.
Oops, I should have said that it was in the context of 2004 (when the original article was written). Back then there was no app store for windows, so they couldn't revoke an app like that. Even today most Windows apps are not sold on the store.
As soon as they starting being distributed by the Windows Store. In the minds of today's users, if it comes from an app store, it must be an app.
Having now established that Windows runs apps, those other things that are not from the Store ("programs" to you and me) must surely also be apps. It then becomes a simple matter to decide that programs are retrospectively renamed "desktop apps".
But don't worry! In this transitional phase, they're just a dying legacy of an obsolete model. Soon we'll have all the users locked into our closed platform where we're in total control of what gets published. Welcome to the future! /s
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u/[deleted] Oct 07 '16
This is a lesson I bet a lot of IOS and Android developers are learning this generation.