Microsoft really wants to make sure iOS and Mac developers are keeping Internet Explorer 10 in mind when working on their projects. To help bolster that effort, the company is offering developers a better deal than consumers are ever likely to see: a QuickStart kit that includes “free” (after $25 donation to one of three charities) copies of Windows 8 Pro and Parallels Desktop 8. Both pieces of software will be shipped on a USB stick at the end of April.
via The Verge.
This follows Microsoft offering $100 to developers who were building Windows apps.
Both approaches constitute bribes. What Microsoft are missing however, is that developers flock to platforms that work for them. The very fact that they have to offer this to developers in order to get them to develop for IE 10 says all developers need to know.
It harks back to the days where you would develop a website that worked perfectly fine in all the browsers except for IE, and then spend 20% (sometimes more) of the budget fudging it to work in IE.
When IE is compliant enough to not require a whole lot of additional testing and bug fixing, that’s when developers will actually start using it.