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Category: Windows

Windows Store: The (almost) Final Countdown

Windows Store: The (almost) Final Countdown

Quick post today, working to have a comprehensive rundown of Windows Store stats about mid-day Friday (pending any sort of explosion in either the number of apps or my system that counts them). But today, wanted to run through the basic set of numbers most people are interested in. Worldwide: As of today, there are 7,873 Windows Store apps available worldwide. Of these, 88% (6,964) are free – mirroring the percentages first seen much earlier this month. The number of…

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Windows Store: Top Markets

Windows Store: Top Markets

A reader earlier today asked if the overall growth of the global count of apps while US English stayed at a lower count generally meant that non-English markets were growing well. The answer is yes – in fact I pointed out that the locale with the second largest app count is the Chinese/China locale, at 3,456 – which interestingly has a much higher app count than any other Chinese markets (Chinese/Singapore: 3,104, Hong Kong: 3099, or Taiwan: 2953) – indicating that…

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Bill Hill – the authentic type

Bill Hill – the authentic type

Looking through my old email – it was apparently 13 years ago this week that I first exchanged email with Bill Hill. We had been working on making all of our content on Slate into a neutral format so we could output it into multiple types of content (Word, Word two-column, text-to-speech) – and when I first read Bill Hill’s writing on reading, he captured my imagination about it – when few around him really believed that eBooks could happen,…

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VDI? OMG.

VDI? OMG.

For two days last week, I was at the annual Chicago installment of our Microsoft Licensing Boot Camp. I’ve been to several of our camps to help present a couple of the topics. I’ve also noticed something unusual (and somewhat frightening) occurring. What I’ve seen is the growth of – or at least growth of the interest of – Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI). In VDI, the desktop operating system that a user interacts with is virtualized (and often remotely located)…

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Windows Store: Wednesday Number Time

Windows Store: Wednesday Number Time

Apologies for the brevity of today’s post – didn’t time my travel to Chicago well. This week has been a rather slow week, as I think next week may be as well. I’m anticipating things really picking up as we go in to the week of 10/22 and on after the launch of Windows 8 and Windows RT. There should be well over 5,000 apps on launch day – perhaps more – depends on the bumps on the way. For…

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Windows Store: What’s interesting today?

Windows Store: What’s interesting today?

I thought for something different, I’d take a look through one day’s apps to see what showed up that actually looked interesting to me. Easier said than done, since I decided to do this with yesterday’s apps (356 new apps yesterday). As I noted last week, there are a lot of apps showing up that are simply Web portals. I’m not really considering those in this list. I wanted to try and highlight a few apps and games that looked…

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Windows Store: Show me the numbers.

Windows Store: Show me the numbers.

If you haven’t yet read my post from yesterday, please do. It’s very relevant to this conversation. As I stated – The Windows Store doesn’t need a large number of apps to be successful. It needs a number of great apps that drive people to the platform. Sermon aside, I know many people are visiting this site to find out where the store is at, and where it may be by 10/26. So let’s have a look. As of today, the…

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Windows Store: Charmed, I’m sure.

Windows Store: Charmed, I’m sure.

I noted yesterday on Twitter that many of the apps that are appearing on the store look alike. This is really unfortunate. It’s unfortunate for consumers as they’ll need to sort through lots of chaff to find really unique apps. It’s unfortunate for developers because, well, they’re wasting their time. If you’re a dev who is cutting and pasting into the VS 2012 templates, and putting little effort into making something unique, you’re not going to stand out, and you’re…

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What’s the deal with counting Windows Store apps?

What’s the deal with counting Windows Store apps?

I’ve had a few people ask me why I started counting the number of apps. Why should I care? Do I have some sort of vendetta against Microsoft or something? No. I don’t. The Windows Store count is what it is. I’m not here to say it’ll trounce iOS. I’m not here to say it’ll be a failure. That doesn’t matter, and little I can or do say will change how Windows 8 does with consumers and corporate customers. My goal…

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