Remember having to go over to your friend's house to borrow his Zanac cassette tape? And then going out to buy a double cassette player to be able to copy the game?
Then floppy disks arrived. They were ultra-fast and their capacity was amazing, but that didn't change the fact that you still needed to go back to your friend's house to get a copy of Alley Cat.
Then the internet arrived. And you still had to go to your friend's house to get the diskette for Ishar, because it took far less time to walk six streets away (and play the game for a few hours) than it did to download 1MB.
But the internet was a game changer. After some time you completely forgot about diskettes and you would only visit your friend to get the CD of Dungeon Keeper IIor another classic. Today, you can download 60GB of content in minutes.
Windows 10 is similar when it comes to changing the paradigm of the distribution of the software and, here’s why:
Most of the programs and games for desktops were created for Windows and not for Linux or Mac, and there's a good reason for this. The market share of the windows desktop made working for any other platform a waste of time and money. The market places arrived. And instead of going out to the scary internet to download your programs you would go to a supervised environment where you could download your programs safely.
When it comes to desktops, only an astounding 16.45% of computers (W8 + 8.1) can execute market applications while 72.36% of desktops (W7 + XP) are still stuck in the old paradigm.
So, why develop an application for 16% of computers when, for the same amount of money, we can create the same app for the 88.81% (given that W8 and 8.1 are compatible with the old desktop code)? It's a no-brainer.
Windows 10 has arrived.
Offering Windows 10 as a free upgrade will surely convince most of the users out there with W7, 8 and 8.1 to get the latest updates and with it the ability to be clients of this new market.
And that’s not all. Given that Windows 10 apps will also work in any hardware capable of executing W10, the target audience will be not only increased but probably multiplied.
You will develop an app once and it will be downloadable by desktop users, but also by Windows Phone users, XBox users, Raspberry Pi users and even Hololens users! You name it.
Microsoft estimates that in a couple of years there will be one billion W10 devices out there which brings us back to the question:
Why would anyone develop on any other platform?
This post first appeared on www.codegrimoire.com
