Microsoft’s first-day keynote at its Build developer conference today focused first on Azure and Office platform advancements, but finally moved on to Windows, where the real meat of the day was in my mind. When it comes to Windows, and Windows Phone in particular, one of the key challenges continues to be what I refer to as the user/app vicious circle. Simply put, in our post-iPhone world, when there are no users on a platform it’s tough to attract developers, and when there are few developers and hence few apps, it’s tough to attract users. Windows Phone suffers from a number of issues (see my free in-depth report on the platform), but one of the biggest continues to be the app gap and the app lag.

Attempts to break the vicious circle

The challenge for Microsoft is that’s really tough to break this vicious circle unless you can somehow goose either user numbers or the number of apps. What I saw in today’s keynote was an articulation of Microsoft’s strategy to do both, as shown below:
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