Windows Phone is no longer a new operating system, Windows Phone is available on various mobile terminals, but Windows Phone does not prove to be that attractive for application developers. Microsoft has intensively promoted its operating system for mobile terminals, but it seems that it still has a lot of work to do because it has to invest hundreds of thousands of dollars in order to attract developers on its platform. It seems that Microsoft is currently contacting the developers of some popular applications and offering them between $60.000 - $600.000 to develop a version of their own title for Windows Phone.
The New York Times reported on Thursday that Microsoft is reportedly coughing up development costs for big-name apps, and prices range from $60,000 and $600,000 depending on the app. Microsoft's tactics have already managed to sway Foursquare and Ben Huh of Cheezburger Network to bring applications to its platform. "We have very limited resources, and we have to put them towards the platforms with the biggest bang for our buck," FourSquare's head of business development Holger Luedorf told The New York Times. "But we are a social network and it is incredibly important for us to be available on every platform."
Of course, such a strategy cannot be doomed to failure considering that developers lose almost nothing if they port their applications to the Windows Phone platform because the development costs are covered by Microsoft. I don't know if the strategy will be beneficial in the long term because some will wait for an "invitation" from Microsoft to develop applications for Windows Phone, but for now the company from Redmond has managed to collect 70.000 applications in the Windows Marketplace and the number is constantly growing.
