据newsfactor报道，微软Windows Phones高级总监布兰登·沃森（Brandon Watson）日前通过公司博客表示，Windows Phone 7应用商店重视产品质量而非数量。

他在博客中写道，“我们一直很在乎质量而不是数量，并认识到WP7平台应该选择出色的应用程序，而不能为了堆砌数字，不顾用户的实际需求，将‘壁纸’也划分为其中的一类产品，或者为了增加数量，允许竞争对手的应用在WP7平台现身。”

游戏邦获悉沃森还在博客中发布了一组数据以自证这一说法，主要包括：WP7应用开发者工具目前下载量超过了150万次；WP7应用商店共有1.15万款产品，其中付费应用占7500款；用户每月平均下载12款应用。

wp7-marketplace

微软的核心竞争力

市场调研公司IDC分析师Al Hilwa对微软的WP7应用增长率、应用产品质量等衡量标准很感兴趣，在他看来，微软的手机应用正呈现乐观的发展征兆——它的发展速度是Android刚登台时的2倍。

据Hilwa所称，“这一点并不令人意外，因为微软的核心竞争力就是打造平台。他们需要在移动设备多样性、质量和数量等方面再加把劲。打造一个手机平台，在初级阶段就需要良性循环的投入以不断增加应用数量，以及运行这些应用的接口。”

诺基亚与微软的同盟关系，以及平板电脑的市场需求，可以让后者从中得到好处。一名微软高管在本周曾表示，他认为平板电脑可能只是一时的热潮，但游戏邦认为至少iPad已经拉动了苹果平台的应用销售，Android平板电脑也发挥了同样的作用。

除此之外，微软现在还正与走不同路线的RIM竞争，Hilwa表示黑莓PlayBook平板电脑很可能就是黑莓智能手机未来一两年的发展方向。“虽然看起来有点古怪，但PlayBook确实是目前所有平板电脑中功能最丰富的设备，它强大的操作系统和处理器吸引了不少开发者为其创建应用。”

微软还没有出局

微软并不打算与苹果在应用程序上过招——它的目标是与谷歌Android取得战略平衡，它之前还起诉了一些Android设备制造商。一些分析师原先认为Android有可能难以招架法律诉讼缠身的问题，虽然Hilwa并不认同这种说法，但也明确表示微软不会出局。

“比法律诉讼更有效的手段是微软与诺基亚携手合作，这样诺基亚就得在谷歌和微软生态圈中作出抉择，我们最近得知摩托罗拉就有打算选择除了Android之外的其他操作系统，因为太多设备制造商都采用Android平台，大家已经很难在这轮角逐中让产品呈现差异化的价值。”（本文为游戏邦/gamerboom.com编译，转载请注明来源：游戏邦）

In Mobile Apps, Quality Trumps Quantity, Microsoft Says

Microsoft says it’s building quality Windows Phone 7 apps rather than playing the mobile-apps numbers game like Apple and Google. Microsoft’s Brandon Watson said 11,500 Phone 7 apps are available and developers are showing interest. Although Microsoft is behind Research In Motion on tablets, an analyst warned not to count Microsoft out.

Microsoft is making a case for its Windows Phone 7 app store — partly by taking a swing at Apple and Google. The overarching message: Quality is better than quantity.
“We have always been focused on quality over quantity,” Brandon Watson, a senior director at Windows phones, wrote in the company’s blog. “We recognize the importance of getting great apps on our platform and not artificially inflating the number of actual apps available to customers by listing ‘wallpapers’ as a category, or perhaps allowing competitor’s apps to run on the platform to increase ‘tonnage.’”

Watson went on to publish some numbers he said prove his point. For starters, he said Phone 7 developer tools have been downloaded more than 1.5 million times. There are 11,500 apps in the store, and 7,500 are paid. Customers download an average of about 12 apps a month. The list of stats goes on and on as Microsoft works to make itself attractive to developers.

Microsoft’s Competition

Al Hilwa, an analyst at IDC, is impressed with Microsoft’s metrics, particularly the growth rate and the quality of the app portfolio. As he sees it, Microsoft is hitting the app milestones at a good clip — about twice as fast as Android did at this stage of its development.

“This is not a surprise to me because platform building is a Microsoft core competency. What they have to work harder on is building up the other side of the equation, namely the device portfolio diversity, quality and sheer numbers,” Hilwa said. “Building out a platform in the early stages requires a virtuous cycle of investments to increase both apps and sockets to run them continuously.”

The Nokia-Microsoft partnership could pay dividends for Microsoft, and so could a larger push into tablets. A Microsoft executive said this week he thinks tablets could be a fad, but at least for now the devices are driving success in apps for Apple and, to a lesser extent, Android.

But Microsoft is also competing against Research In Motion, which is taking a different approach. Hilwa explained that the BlackBerry PlayBook tablet is potentially what the BlackBerry smartphone will look like in a year or two.

“Despite some quirkiness, the PlayBook has one of the most versatile set of capabilities of any of the tablets that have shipped so far,” Hilwa said. “The powerful OS and processor have been harnessed to aggregate several developer ecosystems to generate apps.”

Don’t Count Microsoft Out

Microsoft isn’t essentially trying to compete head-to-head with Apple in apps — the software giant is working to gain ground on Google’s Android. Microsoft has even launched legal maneuvers against Android. Some analysts have gone so far as to say that Android might not live through the legal attacks. Although Hilwa disagrees, he isn’t counting Microsoft out, either.

“Even more effective than lawsuits are big deals like the Microsoft-Nokia deal, which surfaces the framework that Nokia had to think through in choosing between Google’s and Microsoft’s ecosystems,” Hilwa said. “We have seen lately that Motorola, for example, wishes to do something other than rely solely on Android for a smartphone strategy, presumably driven by the inability to differentiate against any number of other manufacturing giants who are in a race to the bottom in terms of differentiated value.”（source:newsfactor）