The whole quote from Google is absolutely ridiculous. :



You create a new platform because

a) you think you can do it better
b) you want to make money.
c) you can leverage existing technology and skill sets to make more content available.

. . . just like Google did.

Where MS thinks they can do it better (based on their people interviewing on podcasts) is they feel it helps everyone to build a developer-centric app creation process and store, rather than a consumer driven one. I have my doubts as to whether this approach will even touch the existing smart phones, but it will be interesting to see. I have little doubt that Silverlight will be the best and easiest way to create smart phone apps. XAML + C# is a powerful, powerful combination. IMO, C# surpassed Java a long time ago in terms of the best laid out general purpose language, and XAML is absolutely awesome for building content presentation. I'm not certain on the specifics of what they are planning to do with the store, but the claim is that it will be easier for consumers to "find your app" and for developers to be rewarded for creating great stuff.

I guess the notion is that this will allow the best apps to be created for the windows phone (much like windows desktop has a richer library of available applications than Apple, even if Apple continues to win in certain markets such as sound engineering and graphics), but that might not work for phones the way it worked for desktops. The problems with this line of thinking are:

a) The iPhone has a huge head start on great apps
b) Android's Java is still the most popular development language
c) Running apps, while very important, is not the core feature of a phone.

As a developer, the idea of creating content and being rewarded for it excites me, especially since I can leverage skills I already have. In fact, I probably WILL look into writing a windows phone app once I have time to breath in my current work project (and I can be confident people are actually buying these phones and creating a market for the software). Unfortunately, as consumer it will be very hard to drag me off of my iPhone, and that's the rub I think.

A funny thing is that the project I'm currently on is a banking product and part of what we are building is a monitoring/trouble shooting tool that graphically represent the health of our back-end process and allows us to correct certain error states. This is currently built in WPF, but it would not be difficult at all to change to Silverlight and make the app available for a Windows phone. Once the system goes live each of the developers will be on call during banking hours, so having this application available on our phones would be a HUGE win. This means there's a chance we could end up with company owned Windows phones (right now they pay for my iPhone service). As cool as that would be, I'm not sure I desire it because that would mean giving up my beloved iPhone.