I just can't get excited about developing for Windows anything these days. And mind you, I've been using PC's almost exclusively for a very long time. Somehow, somewhere MS lost it's way. Some might argue that it never had a "way". That's fine. I don't care. I've made a lot of money using MS products and the Linux world probably wouldn't exist without the commodity hardware created by the MS ecosystem. Credit where it is due.

It's hard to argue with the assertion that MS has failed to be a thought and technology leader for a long --long-- time. And so, when they roll out Windows Vista, 7 and then 8 and then Metro and Windows Phone 8 and they keep, well, fucking it up...

I am not in love with Apple. Not by a long-shot. They are user-friendly and developer-hostile. And they make dumbshit moves of monumental proportions too (Maps, anyone?). Still, for a new or even an existing venture, I can't see considering doing mobile development much outside the iOS ecosystem.

In other words, in order to gain real traction and find a market it is a no-brainer that you should develop the app/service/product for iOS. Somewhere in the adoption curve it might make sense to deploy to Android and a far, far distant third might be WP8.

What would MS have to do to change that sentiment? I don't know.

On the tech front I really do like the idea of my phone, tablet and desktop playing nice with each other. Or having mountable file system access to my phone and tablet. But that's a geek thing. Grandma doesn't give a shit. She doesn't even know. So, I'll count myself out as a "typical customer" --whatever the hell that might be.

Market penetration might be the key here. Nobody, outside of tech circles --and barely at that-- is talking about WP8 or MS tablets. The Surface commercials I saw are retarded, to say the least. To take a stab at my "what can they do?" question, I'd say: They have to fire their entire marketing department and bring fresh thinking into the organization. The technology is probably good-to-excellent.

EDIT: An example of the brain-dead marketing is the commercial that spends tons of time highlighting the desktop stand flap on Surface. Really? You (MS) really think that you are going to get me to buy Surface over iPad because of a frigging plastic flap? Fire them all! They are a bunch of morons.

They've enjoyed market supremacy for so long that they've never really had to be good at marketing. It's the old "You don't get fired for buying IBM" saying from the mainframe days. MS has always sucked at marketing. Apple has always owned them on that front. Now Apple makes a dumbshit move (Maps, anyone) or two and neither MS nor Google have any semblance of a fine-tuned marketing drive to take advantage of it.

So, when faced with such marketing incompetence I, as a developer, look at the situation and conclude that I have to stay with the company that is better at selling. If you are good at selling you can sell pet rocks. If you suck at it you are selling polished gravel. The quality of the rocks doesn't matter.

It's not a chicken-and-egg situation. It is a very clear market dominance and financial-risk situation. I have zero interest in taking the financial risk to participate in an offering that is marketed, sold an supported in a half-assed fashion.

So, yeah, great Developer Platform. I'm a business man. Show me the market opportunity and I'll carve code into stone tablets in hex if it is worth my while. Anything else is just bullshit.