At its Build developer conference last week, Microsoft made a pair of announcements about Windows development that were more than a little surprising:
Windows will support applications developed for iOS and Android.
This immediately felt like a dangerous move. Windows will not be the first operating system to run foreign applications. Famously, IBM advertised OS/2 as a "Better Windows than Windows" in the 1990s, boasting that its platform would run all your existing Windows applications with greater stability and performance. More recently, BlackBerry 10 included support for Android applications, with BlackBerry licensing the Amazon App Store and using it as its gateway to a world of Android-compatible software.
Neither OS/2 nor BlackBerry 10 has made a success of this capability. There are two major problems with supporting foreign applications on a niche platform. The first is straightforward: it removes any incentive for developers to bother with the native platform. Investing in developing for a minor platform is already something of a gamble, and by telling developers "Oh hey, you can just use your existing Win16 or Android program..." as IBM and BlackBerry (respectively) did, you're implicitly sending them a message. "Don't bother learning our platform or writing native apps for it."
