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Comment by martythemaniak | Hacker News Reader

Here's the question that's critical for both Windows 8 and BB10 - is having a good product enough anymore?

By most accounts WP8 is pretty good and we can give RIM the benefit of the doubt and assume BB10 will be pretty good as well. But are consumers going to care? Is that enough to move a significant number of units? Other than being different, what exactly are these platforms offering? I've read through the new and exciting features - preditive keyboards, email at a glance, good multititasking - and all I think is "neat, but I've been doing that on my phone for years"

It seems that while WP8 and BB10 are still trying to nail down the "modern OS on decent hardware" problem, iOS and Android have moved on to the next level of competition - ecosystems (iTunes, Google Play) and smart services (Siri and Google Now).

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About a hundred years ago you could've asked the same questions of the car industry.

I'm not a fan of RIM, but the iPhone might just be today's Ford Model T.

Your perspective is refreshing, however it's worth noting that the automotive market doesn't have the same network effects as mobile computing. All cars take the same gasoline and oil for the most part.

All mobile devices use TCP/IP and have browsers. But they also all have specific add-ons: cases, plugs, add-on mics, tie-ins with devices - medical, etc. Just like all cars have a lot of after-market parts (spoilers, rims, etc) that all only fit specific car/models.

Kinda important to mention apps when talking about smartphones.

Sure, you can buy Angry Birds (or whatever) again for $0.99 if you switch platforms, but will you buy all of your apps again? And what if you really like an app that's only on one platform?

I am of the belief, that the latter is what we will prevent migration to a new platform but not the former.

Perhaps power users would rather not repurchase dozens of paids of apps; but for the average user, the amount of money invested into apps would probably be on par with the amount of money invested into a case for said phone.

So that makes a blackberry walking without shoes?

I can't speak for WP8 but Blackberry still has customers who although have switched to Android/iPhone, loved their blackberries. And there is a case of, many corporates still using Blackberries. The land has been sliding but if RIM can win those users back, there is hope.

Now I see the ecosystem problem,but for RIM (or anyone willing to enter Mobile OS market), it is a chicken and egg problem. They can't move onto next step, unless they have a strong phone. So nobody knows if BB10 is going to work, but at the moment, it seems like a good idea.

I'm not even sure "good enough" is good enough. As everyone is mentioning, the ecosystem is a large force driving consumer choice. WP8 suffers from the same problem that RT devices are going to suffer from. Lack of ecosystem. In my opinion, WP8 functionality is still long behind Android and the experience, while impressive given WP8's age, is really not compelling over Android 4.0-4.2.

"Why should I buy a WP?" is a question I've yet to have answered well except for the single person I know that uses Outlook.com and Skydrive.

Just bought a Surface over the weekend to develop on, and you're absolutely on the money.

Win8 (on tablet, desktop is something else entirely) suffers tremendously from lack of ecosystem. I expected at least a few of the big brands to offer apps - but no Spotify, no Rdio, no Pandora (making the device musically useless), no Yelp, no Facebook... makes me wonder what exactly the point of the device is for the average user.

The browser on the Surface is the best I've ever used on a mobile device. It is fast, responsive, and unlike iOS tabbed browsing feels like a first-class feature instead of an afterthought. Compatibility with desktop sites is also top-notch.

So really what I have sitting on my desk right now is a touch-based browsing machine with an ingenious keyboard... and not much else. I love the design on this thing, and I really want the whole "powerhouse tablet" notion to take off, but there are so many pieces missing that I just don't see how.

Side note: after playing with the SDK for a weekend I'm starting to come to the realization that MS's dev ecosystem may be a liability for them. I've been thinking about putting together some easy apps that would provide some basic expected functionality (IM?), but the open source ecosystem essentially does not exist at all in the .NET world. I've run into page after page of commercial, proprietary libs to do even reasonably basic things and scant few open source ones I can take advantage of.

Both iOS and Android have benefited tremendously from a large, comprehensive open source stack making the lives of app builders easier. Win8 in its current state feels like I need to invent the internal combustion engine to build a car.

>the open source ecosystem essentially does not exist at all in the .NET world

I've been complaining about this for years as a fan of both C# and OSS and now more recently as an employee at Microsoft. It's a problem all across the .NET technology stack. EF gets huge attention everytime they have a new release and add a feature that NHibernate has had for years. If I can't find help on StackOverflow and it's not the 1% of MSDN articles that aren't useless, there's no where to go ask for help. There aren't forums, I've yet to find a reliable IRC room, etc.

It's too bad too, I really kind of like the JS WinRT development model and with some open source grooming could have a lot of neat utilities and kits and layouts built for it. There is huge potential for benefit from a Bootstrap project for Windows 8 apps, but I don't know who would take the time to make it friendly and packaged given the amount that .NET developers seem to love to work in isolation and reinvent the wheel.

edit: Also, the forums are just a joke anyway. Try to post something with some code, or an error, or a log or just something with multiple lines and watch as it's rendered as one huge chunk of text because they're stubborn and force the usage of their tired, unusable RTE.

I'm with you, I'm sitting here thinking that third party developers are the most important thing for Windows platforms right now and they're arguably the weakest. I've seen many complaints (still) about onboarding. They've fractured an ALREADY fractured community of developers further by introducing another runtime that is incompatible (the shim library that ONLY works in C# doesn't count) with .NET and a third MS variant of C++. The examples for WinRT apps are severely lacking, there is broken navigation between them and/or the examples are too trivial to compose into an actual, even just example, application.

(edit: I should clarify. A lot of my frustration in this regard is not with Microsoft, but with the community of Microsoft developers who seem unkeen on using anything but the official Microsoft stack regardless of alternatives. And who seem unkeen on fostering a community the way other OSS projects do. I've received more non-.NET help in a single IRC room in a few hours than I feel like I've ever received from any .NET resource EVER (including a team of MS experts and alumni that were at my disposal for two years).)

I actually went on a long angry rant on Facebook about this, to the displeasure of my friends who work at MS ;)

Lots of the dev process are substantially broken, even before you get to code samples and documentation.

For example, after I install Win8 on my machine I wanted to get started and just play with the SDK. Write a Hello World or something. I Googled how to do this, which led to a Microsoft page with a download link. That link told me to go download it from the Windows Store (why couldn't you just tell me the first time?!). Okay so, downloaded Visual Studio. Start it up. Nope, you can't do anything until you register as a developer (not even Apple requires this!). Okay so, click on link to register, pops open a browser window to log into my MS Account, after which is redirects to another site with the reg form, which insists on having my mailing address, company profile, and phone number (all of these fields are mandatory, as if lone developers just checking out your SDK don't exist). After giving MS all the fake info it demanded I was sent an activation code to paste into Visual Studio.

Seriously. Neither iOS nor Android are this draconian about accessing their SDK. Shit, I can build entire apps in Xcode before signing up as a dev, and Android is even more free with access.

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