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The Smart Techie was renamed Siliconindia India Edition starting Feb 2012 to continue the nearly two decade track record of excellence of our US edition.

May - 2011 - issue > Technology

Time to Change: Revolutionary Platform Enables Windows App Store

Rao Cherukuri
Friday, April 29, 2011
Rao Cherukuri
For ages, users were tied to physical devices for accessing their software applications. The internet, with the availability of connectivity everywhere brought in a new paradigm to software access -not struck to a physical device for my software. However, the flip side has been the limitations such as the need for being always connected and non-productive user experience.

The advent of next generation client devices and the new platforms has further fuelled the need to be able to execute any application on any platform and on any device. In that regard thanks to App Store model which takes the users in that direction a bit closer, but the ability to run an application on any platform is still an issue as there are no viable solutions to address this issue yet.

In this article, we will explore the trends that have contributed to the success of App Store model, the need for a Windows App Store and what is necessary to make the Windows App Store implementation successful and learn about an amazing success story and the technology behind.

Rise of App Store Model
Apple leads the way in delivering the ultimate in user experience with its new breed of applications delivered through the App Store while web application vendors (Google, Salesforce and more) lead the market in flexibility with their browser based access on any device and platform. Yet, both approaches fall woefully short with almost crippled support for migrating thousands of full-featured Windows productivity applications to run within a Web browser or on multiple mobile platforms. Meanwhile, Microsoft, which dominates the PC world, lacks both the flexibility and App Store like experience.

The proliferation of multiple platforms, on the other hand, raises a number of challenges – with the internet evolution, we moved away from writing platform specific applications to platform neutral applications, but now we are regressing to the age of writing applications for each next-generation platform such as iOS or Android. Also, as most productivity applications run exclusively on Windows PCs, nine out of ten users - collectively more than 750 million users - are forced to acquire and learn at least one new device, just to meet their mobile productivity needs.

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