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Comment by vipivip | Hacker News Reader

I welcome Microsoft into the mobile platform competition.

I assume you are being sarcastic.

They have been in this race since the first release of Windows CE in the late 90's. They even dominated the segment for quite some time.

It was sarcasm.

It may be sarcasm, but WP7 is quite a bit different than WinMo 6. Different tools, different design, etc. Developing for WinMo 6 wasn't a hardship, if you knew most of the windows APIs. That said, you had to develop using a lot of familiar Windows APIs.

WP7 is supposed to be cleaner. I don't use it currently, but will be interested when I have the chance (probably later this year).

In a sense, each platform requires that you "adopt" their platform of choice. iOS - OSX, WinCE - Windows, Android - Eclipse (and you aren't going to tell me Eclipse is actually superior to OSX or WinX or Linux -- it is bloated, kludgy, and has it's own quirks -- but it is the easiest platform for android dev)...

That said, the worst mobile dev. platform I've ever used was Symbian. On Windows it was a jumble, on *nix/OSX it was a trip into insanity.

Actually, with the exception of the visual layout tools, I find IntelliJ better in just about every way than Eclipse for Android coding. And it's so much better than XCode 4 that I wouldn't know where to start enumerating the differences.

I know a lot of people are happily coding Android apps with Vim or Emacs and command line tools too.

Are you referring to the IntelliJ community edition? I program on the 3 major smartphone platforms (iOS, Android, an WP7) and Android is perhaps the most painful with Eclipse. I'd be interested in IntelliJ if I could use the free version (but I don't see any reference to Android)

The feature comparison here http://www.jetbrains.com/idea/features/editions_comparison_m... shows that Android is supported in the Community Edition (free version)

Yeah. Android development is completely supported in the free version. Give it a shot. I've been an IDE hater for most of my career but IntelliJ really does increase my productivity.

What is the deal with companies who have dominated the mobile sector, Palm, Nokia, Microsoft, just losing focus, ignoring it for a while, and then letting someone else come in and start making all this money.

Will Apple and Google head down this path? Unlikely, it seems to be worth more money now than ever.

They start thinking the whole world revolves around them. They fail to take competition seriously and fail to employ disruptive innovation to create their next generation products. They forget people are buying usefulness and think their clients want their products. The average user doesn't want a computer/PDA/whatever - the average user wants to do the things they once needed computers/PDAs/whatever for.

Will it happen to Apple and Google? Not sure. Possibly.

When companies get big, they start to abhor change. Change is what keeps companies smart.

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