My Windows 8 app approaching 100,000 downloads | Hacker News Reader

My Windows 8 app approaching 100,000 downloads

blogs.msdn.com

46 pointsrecoiledsnake27 comments

The fact this is pumped out by someone with an MSDN blog makes me suspicious. Very gushy. As a Microsoft gold partner, this gushiness is not universal. In fact most of us are currently being fucked with extortionate licensing changes and are considering bailing out.

For reference, out of our 5500 individual clients, we've got one single windows 8 user and they're internal testing team. That spans pretty much everyone from small businesses to corporations. We have seen a growth in win7 vs winxp though since win8 was released.

He's a Microsoft employee. It would take about 2 seconds to click the link on his name to see that.

Are you implying he is lying? Half of the iOS posts are from folks like John Gruber or Marco Arment. Are you suspicious when they write a post? Or when someone from Mozilla writes a pro-Mozilla post, etc? Are you suspicious that Apple may actually be bankrupt, because their earnings numbers come from a suspicious source -- the Apple CFO?

In this case he's giving useful data to those on the fence about Win8 developement. I see no reason why an individual would lie, given he doesn't even have corporate anonimity to hide behind.

With that said, the numbers look good and promising.

Yes I know, and from extensive experience, I'd trust the mouth of a 409 scammer more. Reputation as well as bad reputation are earned.

Re Apple: Bankrupt no - morally bankrupt perhaps.

Its not on the fence when MSFT issued Surface tabs to every staff member.

> Its not on the fence when MSFT issued Surface tabs to every staff member.

Quite the opposite, most Microsoft employees could only get a Surface RT in this first round if they went through the same retail channel that everyone else had to. I know two MS employees here in Atlanta who were telling me how they wished they could get one, but couldn't yet.

Surfaces will be distributed to employees in late December.

I stand corrected :)

Sometimes the anti-MS sentiment here is almost as silly as the gushiness of the MSDN blog post.

Given Windows8 sold upwards of 3million licenses within the first couple of days (and probably many more now), 100k downloads of a card game app seems pretty darn reasonable to me. This factor becomes even less surprising if the app is promoted in the Win8 app store, or if it is one of the few card game apps, etc. Also, this number is downloads, so maybe people grabbed it, checked it out and deleted it. I haven't looked into specifics. But given the size of the ecosystem, the number doesn't seem unreasonable.

To follow up on gushiness, as others have commented, this particular post was on MSDN which is a Microsoft property. Microsoft has a pretty decent infrastructure for developer support (and has had for a long while). A lot of people working within the Microsoft development ecosystem like the tools, the platform, etc. A person, employee or not, posting about his positive experiences is to be expected.

For myself, I'm eh on Win8. I see the "Metro" interface as an oversized task bar/start menu for what is a better/faster desktop experience. That said, I mainly use my Mac. The developer tools from Microsoft, on the other hand, I actually find are better overall than XCode, the android ecosystem, etc. For an IDE, VS is pretty good.

>A person, employee or not, posting about his positive experiences is to be expected.

He's not only an employee, he's a mobile product evangelist.

An evangelist who happens to have also gone through the effort to write an app and submit it to the store.

Again, it's on MSDN, so not really surprising.

I'm not sure about Apple, but I know Google has developer evangelists as well.

Consumers may or may not "love windows 8" but this article is swimming in non sequitur.

But I get it.

To frame this post in context, from my stint at Microsoft I saw how serious points are awarded to those who beat the drums. Logic be damned; if your W8 app get 100K downloads and your glowing blog post makes the rounds it's a favorable line item on your review.

So it's hard to comprehend for a lot of us, but when Microsoft says that Windows 8 is the most openly developed operating system in the world, I think they honestly believe it. Believing it brings tangible rewards.

As a partner, we get a view inside the organisation occasionally. What we see is almost what you've described, but I think its more a crazy mix of Stockholm syndrome, dictatorship propaganda and everyone clambering over each other to suck dick.

It scares the shit out of me that so many businesses trust this culture.

In truth, employees are not rated at all on whether their app gets downloads, unless maybe you're one of the in-box apps. Apps like the one linked above are covered under a moonlighting policy -- basically, feel free to create an awesome app and sell it and keep the profits, but don't use any company resources or time to make it happen[1]. Getting 100k downloads will absolutely not factor in on your review.

Also, I'm not sure Windows 8 was ever marketed as the most openly developed OS in the world. It IS the most open of any Microsoft OS to date, however, so maybe that's why you are confused.

1) There were some exceptions to this rule I believe for WP8 apps but I'm not entirely clear on the details.

(Microsoft employee)

Visibility is everything at MS. Is there a line item on your review for "W8 App d/l #s"? No absolutely not. Are there positive career effects for your boss being able to say "yeah, so-and-so wrote an early Win8 app and got a bunch of good reviews and X hundred thousand downloads and got it highlighted in MSDN as an early win for the platform"? You'd better believe it.

(ex-MSFT, 14y)

I don't know why the OP talks about a 'gold rush' when he's only showing download numbers. If his in-app purchases actually convert at a reasonable rate, THEN that'd be something.

This article reeks of astroturfing, something I see a lot from the Microsoft troupe. Other comments seem to support this. I get the feeling I'd like Microsoft's products a lot more if they didn't try and fake this stuff.

If you click his name, he's an MS employee.

The big difference between Apple and Android ecosystems that everybody spoke about at the beginning was that Apple users were willing to pay for apps and Android users were (in the beginning at least) less likely to pay up.

So here's the question for MS. Are your users willing to pay? The OP put up a graph about in-app purchases with no scale on the y-axis. To me that implies that there's no real money to show us yet. But I'm happy to be disproved.

You are forgetting the ad revenue here. this seems like a big opportunity to me.

"people older than 55 are not only satisfied with Windows Store apps user experience, they are actually willing to pay money for premium features".

Or it could be that people older than 55 are the biggest market for card games, regardless of platform? The entire article is filled with illogical conclusions. Please don't post this bullshit on HN, articles that so grossly underestimate their audience's intelligence are just irritating.

Flagged.

This reads like an infomercial... like someone was paid to write it.

I'm pretty sure the guy's an evangelist for Microsoft. The article seems so over the top that it's infomercial territory.

I agree. I think surface is pretty cool, but this is a little too positive.

For those of you who will participate in a future platform with a day 1 launch... consider card games. There's a massive audience for them, which is a great reason why he's seeing such exceptional performance. Of course, being free also helps (as there's no friction).

If someone is looking at an app store on Day 1, for games, there's a chance that they just want to play Solitaire, Freecell, or another card game. I give this guy credit for recognizing that. Over time he'll likely see much more than 100,000 downloads.

I am jealous. I want a hockey-stick chart too :)... Thanks for sharing though, I blogged my own numbers as well - see http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4770483

spoiler, we did NOT get 100k downloads. not yet at least.

direct link: https://bitly.com/ZaeRY9

Yes, and Karl Rove reported that Obama won Ohio. Don't trust the source.

Obama did win Ohio...should we deny that fact just because Rove said it?

> "I now have some very hard numbers that support the fact that users from all age groups love Windows 8! First, the download and purchase stats."

Correlation doesn't imply causation. It could be that people downloaded your app to distract themselves from the pain and frustration of using that operating system.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com