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Comment by skl_ | Hacker News Reader

I never thought that I'd read about Microsoft allowing something like this. There seems to be a sea change in culture towards openess amongst the Big Guys at the moment. It's unfortunate however that these companies are only beginning to invest now that their core products are at stake.

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They always allowed it on the old WinMo -- and they never tried to shut down the OS hackers making custom versions. Even Google tried to shut down Cyanogen, before finding a compromise and backing off.

And Microsoft has always allowed you to load whatever you want on Windows, even if they've worked really, really hard to make sure that what most people want installed is their own software, often by bundling and such. (The Windows 8 Marketplace will be a departure from this, but there are already loopholes and there will likely be more.)

They even let you load your own stuff on XBox -- and on the Zune HD -- using their free dev tools. Now that Sony has backed off their Linux for PS3 support, Microsoft is the only console maker to support this.

Microsoft knows that power users and early adopters are a crucial market for them if they're going to grow their tiny phone share at all. Power users and early adopters often like to do things that are outside the box. So if they can offer enough of the openness of Android (not nearly all of course, but enough), maybe more people will come on board for a sort of best-of-both-worlds thing: a locked down platform for the overwhelming majority that cares more about security, and an override for the enthusiasts who want to homebrew apps.

I guess it really was taken for granted until closed systems like iOS came along. A closed operating system from Microsoft prior to Apple would be very difficult to image indeed.

> I never thought that I'd read about Microsoft allowing something like this.

Microsoft can be surprisingly open and user-friendly when it feels threatened. Right now they are fully aware of the disaster that awaits them in the long run if WP7 fails in the market - Win8 seems like a stopgap measure, aimed more towards running legacy corporate desktop applications than being a true citizen of this brave new world of simplified user experiences. It's no culture change - it's adaptation for survival.

Although I'm happy MS is doing it, I'm absolutely positive that the only reason for it is to attract more developers to their platform and try to compete with Apple in one of the few areas they are widely regarded as deficient.

I don't think it's a sign of sea change at all, sadly.

Is "to attract more developers to their platform and try to compete with Apple" not a good enough reason?

Well, it suggests that if they ever became competitive with Apple they would lose all interest in providing open access to their platform.

By 'sea change' I'm not just referring to this instance, I'm thinking also of Silverlight and of Adobe's recent announcement about dropping Flash for mobile devices. There's also the fact that HTML5 is now a new focus for both companies (Windows 8, Adobe's authoring toolset).

It seems to me that the dynamic is, you can gain marketshare at the cost of profit per customer by being more open. So it's the competitors who aren't in first place in a given market that would consider it.

Considering that jail-braking cellphones is legal, Microsoft wasn't in a legal position to stop it, but I do give them credit for finding a way to make money from it.

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