How Microsoft will get to 100k Win8 apps by January

Let’s be realistic here. The Windows 8 Marketplace has about 4,000 apps as of today. There are already financial incentives at play, like MS offering better returns than other markets (30% of the app price, until the app reaches $25,000 or equivalent of lifetime sales and then they change to 20% of the app price).  That hasn’t lead to an explosion of any sort. There will definitely be an uptick in interest when Win8 is finally released on October 26, but when Microsoft says that they’ll have 100,000 apps within three months of release they must be smoking something. There’s only one way to do that and it’s Windows Phone apps being able to be run on Win8. It means a shared marketplace of some sort. The issue is APIs of course but there’s a lot of Twitter noise from devs about NDAs lately and how there is something ridiculous out there still. My guess is this is what it’s all about. Natively running WP apps on W8. That would make 70k Win8 apps available overnight.

There would still be reason to ‘port’ apps. At present they wouldn’t have all of the screen resolutions of WP (which is WVGA) so you’d still want a proper port for screen resolutions and quite frankly, phone apps on large screens are never as good as apps designed with tablets in mind. But it would be an awesome reveal…yet another one which I don’t understand why they would be holding back.

They definitely have something up their sleeve though and it won’t be revealed until Build, but why?  Start making noise. Get this shit rolling. Or just sit back and wait until days before after a massive launch of a new desktop and mobile OS to even begin to share details with the world and wonder why it failed…you know, either way I guess 😉