In order for Windows 8 to be a success from an app development standpoint, MSFT needs to make their apps the easiest to develop. Their SDK must be the best. They should have starter projects, and go crazy on supplying developer resources & starter apps. They need to make apples development & submission process look and feel outdated.
Windows is and will remain a huge OS with a ton of opportunity, but MSFT needs to do a better job incentivizing developers to build apps. Make it the easiest platform to get started with.
Developers want a market (consumers), consumers want content (by developers). A classic chicken-egg feedback loop.
Easier to develop apps is just one point that can ease the feedback loop, but its not sufficient...nor is it shockingly necessary (just look at Apple).
Disclosure: MSFT employee, just sharing what I've learned about platforms (and what many probably already know).
My point was that barriers don't matter much when you have a healthy market to receive your app. So while we might work on lowering barriers, its all for not if the store is a ghost town. This is very humbling to us PL/tools researchers.
What keeps you working on Apple's platform is the popularity of the app store, if you couldn't get customers; you would leave in a heart beat for a platform that had a healthier market. Look at all the people who learned Objective C...not because it was the best language, but because it was a technical barrier that was necessary to overcome to access a healthy market (and technical barriers are much easier to overcome than market barriers!).
I enjoy the aesthetic of Windows 8 and was really excited to start messing around with app development as a new hobby project. The WinRT API, though... it's very bare.
Perhaps I was naive thinking the WinRT API would be similar to .NET, but Microsoft could have made it much, much simpler for current .NET developers to start working with WinRT.
My biggest gripe is that WinRT seems to be 100% focused on mobile/tablet platforms. My laptop has Windows 8 and I spend all of my time in the desktop, away from apps. Why? Because there's a lack of "real" applications in the Windows 8 Store. Writing system utilities for a more technical audience is almost impossible. They replaced the excellent System.IO namespace with the Windows.Storage namespace, which doesn't give you access to much of the computer's actual storage [1].
Hopefully I'm wrong and someone posts a reply with an easy way to search through the computer's files and folders, but I'm not getting my hopes up.
>They replaced the excellent System.IO namespace with the Windows.Storage namespace, which doesn't give you access to much of the computer's actual storage
For security reasons. You can open a file picker, but you can't just spider directories on the hard disk, because Windows 8 has quite restrictive sandboxing.
Although for most purposes you can tell it to just use the "defined" Documents space (effectively user/MyDocuments) which means you shouldn't HAVE to worry about spidering down directories for your save files and such.
Not associated with MS, but currently developing for the Windows Store :-)
Windows is and will remain a huge OS with a ton of opportunity, but MSFT needs to do a better job incentivizing developers to build apps. Make it the easiest platform to get started with.