[ianbishop]

I think Microsoft took a really interesting strategy for enticing developers to come develop for the platform. Rather than hold a $1M prize competition (a la Android), they went in a similar direction to the offerings that RIM used for the playbook.

Instead of just giving away a device though, Microsoft really gamified the experience by offering several different prizes (including pre-paid credit cards) and tiers based on the number of apps developed. I think this really helped draw the college crowd in.

They also approached individual companies who have successful applications on other platforms and offered to pay them large good amounts of money to develop for the platform.

It seems like throwing all that money around really did work out for them in the end :).

[sp332]

Microsoft actually wrote their own Facebook app. It's the best mobile Facebook app.

[mtgx]

Google could've really used a similar approach for tablet apps. I find Google's lack of attention towards Android tablet apps very frustrating. It's one of the main reasons, if not the main reason why Android tablets are generally still not considered very good competitors to the iPad. And if the situation really is better than we think its, then they are doing a very poor job at promoting it. This, plus the botched launch of Honeycomb and the expensive tablets running it, really hurt the momentum for Android tablets, and they are still suffering for it.

Google needs to learn how to do launches properly, and they should keep in mind that developer support from day one is extremely important. Apple had like 2000 apps for the iPad in the first days or weeks after launch, because they announced the tablet 2 months ahead, and made the SDK available right away, too. And made the iPhone developers very excited about porting their apps to the iPad. In contrast, Google released the SDK like literally a day before the Motorola Xoom launched (which cost $800 at launch - another extremely dumb move. Asus Transformer was $400 a few months later, and a better device, too), and then everyone started talking about the lack of tablet apps on Honeycomb. Would it have killed them to get the developer support before launch, like Apple? I get really frustrated when I see Google making obvious mistake after obvious mistake like this.

[ben1040]

I sold my Galaxy Tab 10.1 to buy an iPad 3 when they came out, mainly because of the lack of tablet-optimized apps. 9 months into owning it the app situation wasn't any better than on day one, and I gave up.

At least as of mid-March, Google didn't even have a tablet-optimized version of the Google+ app. It was still just a stretched version of the phone view, just like most every other Android app on a tablet would look.

If G+ is supposedly the hub of Google's product strategy going forward, and G+ doesn't have a good experience on tablets, it makes me wonder if they really even care at all about the tablet platform at all.