New and well-made move from Microsoft.
A new website from microsoft promises to make web applications install under windows as simple as a single click.
The format is a web-transposition of the succesfull iPhone appstore. The website offers, through a downloadable installer, a range of free webapps to the disposal of the user or lazy-systemadmin.
While only free apps seems to be available right now, the inclusion of the Free word on each items, makes the possible inclusion of commercial apps foreseable. Notably, the first and most featured app is Wordpress.
Wordpress on Windows. "Code is Poetry".
Also to be noted the extensive talk about Silverlight on the homepage and on many other pages.
What are the goals of this store ?
I can see many:
- Appeal novice users and lazy sysadmins.
- Repair to the lack of software repositories on Windows
- Generate revenue with pay-for apps, in the very same way iPhone AppStore does
- Ease transition to MS server software, by providing opportunely patched applications (keep in mind that most web applications don’t even take in count to be used on a Microsoft server platform).*
- Make good PR as open source software spreader.
- get advantage of the web-traffic generated to promote its own products and standards (buahuahua) such MS SQL Server, MS SharePoint, Silverlight, VisualStudio and more.
- create a new well-defined standard for WebApps willing to be included in the store. That will bring compliance with Microsoft with the promise of more wide-spread diffusion of the application itself.
*Linux platform = LAMP (Linux Apache Mysql Php), Microsoft platform WISPS (Windows Iis Sql-server, Php (or .net, or whatever), Silverlight.
Another thing worth noticing, it’s the site provides a web-form to submit your own app (which will be subject to peer review), but provides no information about the software licenses accepted in the store. It just ask for contact infos.
Without trying to judge any of the intents (Silverlight being the more pushed, apparently) this is a such a clever move from Microsoft. And one that I don’t foresee being reproduced on Linux, mainly because of mentality issues.
It kinds of disappoints me the lack of effort (and results) to ease new developers into the Linux environment.
Further readings:
- my drunken letter about guis and moms. (hey, I wasn’t really drunk, just confused !)
[via PollyCoke - warning: italian language!]
If any of you have the chance to try the store on a Window machine, please report here !
