Comment by manicdee | Hacker News Reader

Comment by manicdee | Hacker News Reader

Why can't you write software tomorrow and have it available to xBox customers the next day? Why can't that other malware author have his Trojan ready to install on millions of xBoxes?

If you are going to sell to console users you have to accept that the platform will live or die based on how easy it is for consumers to use, and how safe they feel using it. The platform will need developers, but it doesn't have to cater to their every whim to survive.

Developers are only important as far as providing reliable and trustworthy applications is concerned. The gatekeeper of the market needs to ensure that software sold through their market doesn't hurt their customers.

Believing that making life easy for all developers (altruistic and malicious alike) is The One True Way to platform popularity is placing far to much emphasis on the small group of people responsible for supply, and nowhere near enough emphasis on the customers.

Follow the money, take care of the people supplying it. If some developers get upset along the way because the world doesn't work the way they want, just shrug and carry on.

I would have no trust for a market that would let me publish the software I write. I write crap :(

ha! i guess i write mostly crap software, too :) i really wasn't trying to imply that you should simply open up the market to self-publishing with no restrictions or oversight. that would screw the customers and therefore the brand very quickly. we did this poorly at microsoft with windows in the early days, and they are still doing it. it's tragic how easily malware still spreads on windows. it's amazing to me that android has so much malware, that google didn't think through security and sandboxing well enough. or revocations, etc. if i were to make a recommendation for xBox development, it would be to build a developer program where I could develop on my console and a few other (100?) consoles (so i could test), akin to how we can do iOS development, and apps would have to be submitted to a store and approved with a little less weird oversight than Apple uses, but quite a bit more oversight than Google or Microsoft uses, to make sure they aren't doing something evil or stupid or aren't malware. it's not so much a belief that making life easier for developers is the most important thing as it is the belief that a free market will allow customers to get great apps and will prevent artificial barriers in distribution and promotion from blocking innovation. customers will spend money where there is innovation.

I don't think Microsoft is charging developers on the order of tens of thousands of dollar per game update, just to check if they maybe put some malware in there.

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