If you disagree with my argument, you should discuss it. If you disagree with my taste, you can do so politely.
> Just scattershot contradiction
It's appropriate when many of the statements are simply false.
- All competitors have Skype. This is not an advantage.
- The interface being "more thoughtfully designed" is debatable. I am hardly alone in preferring vanilla Android over Metro and it remains to be seen how well this interface mimics its big brother. This would create a halo effect if Windows Phone proved very popular. So far, it hasn't.
- A lot of people love Visual Studio. A lot of other people don't. I like it for C# work. I prefer Emacs for Python, JS and PHP. It's also not an option on two out of three major desktop OSs. I find the Android toolset very good for Android development and Xcode is unbeatable for iOS development. For Visual Studio fans, merging Visual Studio with the Android tooling may be a big thing, but for the rest of us, it's inconsequential. Most developers I know base their decisions on things other than what is the IDE that'll be used with a project. I fear for companies that do otherwise.
- Azure may be as good as Google's cloud offerings (haven't paid much attention), but how a platform agnostic cloud service infrastructure can be called a competitive advantage still seems an interesting question. I'd like to see some elaboration on that, because platform agnostic is, well, agnostic.
- Finally, Microsoft has a lot of B2B clout that allows them to throw money into other divisions until they achieve meaningful market share. However, unless Microsoft finds a way to monetize their Android offerings, they'll eventually give up and the phones will have to hold their own. This is an advantage in that Microsoft will offer all kinds of financial incentive to companies who develop for it or sign exclusives. It's money in the bank regardless of application or product success. Unfortunately, in my experience (yes - I have dealt with Microsoft) they are not the most generous partners. They'll offer mostly stuff that costs nothing to them (licenses) in exchange of stuff that has cost to you (effort, exclusivity). I've had much more attractive partnerships.
Visual Studio certainly is an option for Android, iOS and OSX development, when combined with Xamarin. I even think this is the best crossplatform mobile toolset that currently exitst and others think so too [1].
If you think the Android SDK is very good, have you ever started the emulator and tried to debug an app? It's horrendously slow and buggy, if it works at all. iOS and especially WP are so much faster and easier to develop for.
> If you think the Android SDK is very good, have you ever started the emulator and tried to debug an app? It's horrendously slow and buggy, if it works at all.
It really depends. The iOS emulator runs x86 code. The Android emulators are full hardware emulators, but, if you choose to run your software on x86-based virtual hardware, it'll use your CPUs virtualization facilities to run faster than most handsets (which may not be the best idea considering actual hardware is much slower)
> Just scattershot contradiction
It's appropriate when many of the statements are simply false.
- All competitors have Skype. This is not an advantage.
- The interface being "more thoughtfully designed" is debatable. I am hardly alone in preferring vanilla Android over Metro and it remains to be seen how well this interface mimics its big brother. This would create a halo effect if Windows Phone proved very popular. So far, it hasn't.
- A lot of people love Visual Studio. A lot of other people don't. I like it for C# work. I prefer Emacs for Python, JS and PHP. It's also not an option on two out of three major desktop OSs. I find the Android toolset very good for Android development and Xcode is unbeatable for iOS development. For Visual Studio fans, merging Visual Studio with the Android tooling may be a big thing, but for the rest of us, it's inconsequential. Most developers I know base their decisions on things other than what is the IDE that'll be used with a project. I fear for companies that do otherwise.
- Azure may be as good as Google's cloud offerings (haven't paid much attention), but how a platform agnostic cloud service infrastructure can be called a competitive advantage still seems an interesting question. I'd like to see some elaboration on that, because platform agnostic is, well, agnostic.
- Finally, Microsoft has a lot of B2B clout that allows them to throw money into other divisions until they achieve meaningful market share. However, unless Microsoft finds a way to monetize their Android offerings, they'll eventually give up and the phones will have to hold their own. This is an advantage in that Microsoft will offer all kinds of financial incentive to companies who develop for it or sign exclusives. It's money in the bank regardless of application or product success. Unfortunately, in my experience (yes - I have dealt with Microsoft) they are not the most generous partners. They'll offer mostly stuff that costs nothing to them (licenses) in exchange of stuff that has cost to you (effort, exclusivity). I've had much more attractive partnerships.