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Comment by statictype | Hacker News Reader

In reality, if the platform looks like it could be successful, developers will suck it up and write software for it.

I'm sure many developers find Objective-C/Cocoa/Xcode to be a terrible development environment, but they do it anyway, because that's where the action is.

I don't think many people have the type of religious aversion to Windows or non-Apple platforms that Marco is alluding to.

(Also, are there really any high-profile iOS apps remaining that aren't already available on Android because the developer refuses to write software for Android? Instapaper and Flipboard were the biggest I could think of and it's not true for those 2 anymore)

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I also think Marco seriously underestimates how many great developers still use Windows. Much as I dislike it personally, there are lots of reasons to: deep Windows experience, huge ecosystem of tools/companies/etc, games, targeting a Windows-heavy vertical, and so on.

Plenty of these people want to do more for mobile devices, too. Microsoft is in a position to give them an easy way to do that (especially given the shared base of Windows 8, Windows RT and Windows Phone 8). Will it work? We'll see, but if it fails it won't be because Microsoft failed to interest great developers If it fails, it will probably be because Microsoft failed to interest consumers.

There's a very large Windows developer community. And some of those developers have thought about "working individually, in smaller companies, or in startups, building consumer-facing apps or services", and then thought about having to learn a new language, and thought about having to learn a new development environment, and thought about having people seeing you with one of those phones (1), and decided that it wasn't worth the effort or pain.

So some of those developers are just the sort of people who might make the leap into the Windows 8 ecosystem. Microsoft has always looked after developers so I agree with fpgeek that it will be more about PR and marketing and image than the ability to attract developers. Indeed PR and marketing and reality distortion was what enabled Apple to become the dominant player in the smartphone market.

(1) See the religious wars article that happened to be on the front page concurrently with this one: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4150951

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