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I think Microsoft needs to be careful about playing a numbers game here - even while what you hear quoted all the time about these app stores is numbers, it's t
by zmmmmm 14y ago
I think Microsoft needs to be careful about playing a numbers game here - even while what you hear quoted all the time about these app stores is numbers, it's the quality and depth of those apps that matters to the end users. Android has a decent number of tablet optimized apps now, but still not one of the half dozen word processors is what I would call high quality, and nearly all of them are ugly. What will make the platform - and what I believe made iOS such a winner on tablets - is that the apps people experienced delighted them. They were beautiful, extremely high quality, well performing. Things you wanted to show to your friends, and you wanted to pay for. I get a feeling Microsoft is very focused on inflating the store numbers, getting the widest coverage of apps they can on there. But if they are doing that at the expense of quality - so that consumer's first experience of the apps they try do not delight them - that will actually be the downfall of it.
- frozenport 14y agoEverybody wants quality, but I don't see how giving an industry standard benchmark for web-stores put them at a competitive disadvantage. App count is how we compare stores. Lastly, I don't think anybody at MS takes the number as a 1:1 correlation between actual app numbers, and certainly not as a judgement of app quality.
- Derbasti 14y agoMaybe quality is distributed naturally among apps. That would imply that a certain percentage of apps will always veer towards the high quality while a similar percentage will always be rubbish. This would mean that more apps equal more quality. I am inclined to believe in this, if only because natural distributions are so common. (That said, it would be very interesting to compare means and standard deviations between app stores. Would they differ?)
- hessenwolf 14y agoWord processors - which one is good that isn't Microsoft Word, remind me? OO is grotesque and slow. Google docs, for the ease of simultaneous editing is fucking awesome (I just watched 4 people simultaneously update our Saturday thanksgiving meal spreadsheet), but the functionality is pretty basic and clumsy to access.
- naich 14y agoTo be fair, Word isn't that great either. I spend a lot of time shouting at it and for about 95% of the things I do, Google Docs is absolutely fine and not tied to a specific computer. It has become my default word processor.
- hessenwolf 14y agoYes. You have a point. It requires a lot of yelling. I've just realised I like Excel, for what it is. I feel dirty. Maybe this week has been too long.