Burger me! Microsoft's chainsaw rampage through sacred cow herd

Ballmer would turn in his grave. If he was dead

Icono-clasm!

Because the developers haven’t come to Microsoft, Microsoft has to go to where the developers are, which to Microsoft must look like the bar in Mos Eisley spaceport. Microsoft didn’t quite, as rumoured, allow Android .APK binaries to run on Windows. But Android developers will be able to send off their .APK to binaries which will … try and make sure they run on Windows. You could say that’s a difference without a distinction.

"Excuse me, guys? I’m from Microsoft. I'm told Android developers hang out here…”

The fight is really over whether Microsoft stays relevant, and it partially answers the awkward “Cloudobile” koan that Satya Nadella has been posing for over a year. As Myerson said, Microsoft wants this platform to number a billion devices. The answer is “volume”.

The downside is that if everybody produces Windows apps, but nobody is really writing to Microsoft APIs, then Microsoft hasn’t really answered the relevance question. Windows isn’t really adding any value of its own.

To keep Windows “relevant” there has to be just enough on the other side of the fence to be worth a graze. Perhaps it’s Azure, perhaps it’s Maps. It’s probably not Cortana. But something Microsoft flavoured to jam between the #ifdef and #endif statements in your Java or Objective C code.

If there’s nothing unique, then that makes Windows highly vulnerable because the other platforms don’t stand still. A Surface becomes a highly polished and expensive ChromeBook.

There are other downsides too.

If you lower the barrier to entry then a lot of dreck washes over the barrier. Look what happened when BlackBerry made publishing an app in the BlackBerry store really, really easy, to boost its headline app count? It was filled with crap. And remember Apple’s Hypercard? (Some people do, fondly.) Well, writing “apps” for Hypercard was so easy almost anyone could do it. And almost anyone did. Presumably the Store gatekeepers are going to be kept busy.

My reading of it goes like this. Microsoft may have realised that touting a “Universal App” in itself isn’t a huge attraction. The leading three platforms today are web, iOS and Android, and “writing once for Windows” doesn’t make Windows any more attractive overnight. Windows remains the fourth option - not just the fourth, fifth, sixth and seventh options - but still fourth. For proof, look at number of the high quality third party Metro/Modern apps that you’d actively choose to use, if the web version wasn’t available. The FT app is pretty nice … but I can’t think of that many more. If you want to use Amazon or eBay, or you’d be crazy to use the Metro/Modern app. You'd go straight to the website.

So it's apps at all costs. For now, the technology strategy is to make it ridiculously easy for developers to add Windows to their list of build targets, and the business strategy is “hang on in there”. As former Office and Windows Phone designer Jon Bell put it in his fascinating Reddit AMA:

“So when <insert disruptive technology here> blows up, Microsoft can say they kick ass at the cloud AND every endpoint your users might want. That’s huge.”

I’ve heard worse ideas, and it isn’t going to be boring. ®