Charlie Kindel

Microsoft is hoping to get mobile app developers into a new state of preparedness for the upcoming launch of Windows Phone 7 -- announcing this morning that its application development tools will be final on Sept. 16, and its mobile marketplace will start taking submissions in early October.

Applications will be key to the fate of Microsoft's new mobile platform, as demonstrated by Apple's iPhone and Google's Android operating system. We spoke about Windows Phone 7 apps with Charlie Kindel, the Microsoft general manager in charge of getting app developers on board with Windows Phone 7. Continue reading for edited excerpts.

Q: How would you describe the current state of app development for Windows Phone 7?

Kindel: We've enabled this developer ecosystem. It starts with the tools in Visual Studio and Expression Blend, the technologies that are available around the Silverlight platform and XNA Game Studio. Our field and engagement with developers, the DPE organization at Microsoft, this army of people. We have that ecosystem developed. It's clear that we're getting quality, interesting, exciting applications and games. The announcement we just did at Gamescom. Our strategy is about making sure that there's really great quality in both apps and games.

Q: A lot of the focus tends to be on raw numbers. People measure the other mobile app stores by how many apps they have. How are you going to approach that quality vs. quantity issue?

Kindel: If you go to what we announced at Mobile World Congress around the phone user experience. Our message was, we want to build a quality phone experience. Everything about the Metro design language, the hardware we're working with our partners on. The attention to detail that we put into how the phone actually works, and its core functionality, carries directly onto the developer ecosystem. It's about quality. It's about ensuring that end users have the right apps, and that we help them personalize the phone experience through these apps and games. The phone experience is high quality, so the things that they download and use should also be high quality, as well. Actually, having 250,000 things you have to wade through is a poor-quality experience. We don't think that's what we want to aspire to. That's not what end users want. They don't want to have to constantly be sifting through the chaff to get to the good stuff.

Q: On the flip side of that, the human psychology is that, if there's a ton of stuff, the chance is higher that the right stuff will be there.

Kindel: There's a diminishing point of return, and we think we're going to strike a good balance there. But there should be no confusion that we're optimizing for quality and the right titles.

Q: That said, do you have a target number of apps that you'd like to see at launch?

Kindel: I don't. The way to think about it is, let's make sure that we have the right apps, and the ones that, for the customers who are going to go to the store and look to buy a phone, they'll say, wow, those are the apps that I want to use, and wow, I didn't even know that was possible.

Q: A lot of that might happen organically, in part because the tools that you have are the tools being used by people who are already in the Microsoft ecosystem. Have you been doing anything outside the organic process to create financial incentives for developers to make apps?

Kindel: There's two approaches to create this catalog or portfolio of titles. The first is a bottoms-up approach, where the breadth audience, the breadth developer ecosystem says, here's what we want to build. Here's some new, innovative ideas. Or I've seen these other things are popular, so I'm going to build those, or I have this title because it's on another platform and I want to bring it over. We're also taking a top-down approach, where we look at what customers want to use. We look at all sorts of data, some of it is marketplace data. Other is first-party research that we've done into actual usage on other platforms and on our own platforms -- what people really use.

There's a lot of data out there around top sellers. That actually doesn't map to what people want or use in some cases. So we've done some really innovative research to find out, what is it that people really use. So then, we have a whole set of programs. They range from just being able to have call-downs to developers, where we have an evangelist who has a list of developers to call down, as in, Hey, are you on the Windows Phone development platform yet? If not, why not, and what can I do to help you?

We also have co-marketing things. You could interpret some of the co-marketing teams as we're paying developers, but it's not. It's actually things like agreements on ad buys, or revenue guarantees. So we have a whole series of programs that we use to drive that to developers, six or seven different things, some that are more about breadth than others.

Q: What types of apps are most likely to interest you for these co-marketing programs?

Kindel: I think we've defined our target market pretty clearly -- the "life maximizer" as the demographic that the phone is targeting. Applications that have the broadest appeal to that audience, and the applications that those users are going to be excited about personalizing their phone experience with.

Q: How important is it to make sure that Windows Phone 7 has its own killer apps that are unique to it, and where are you on that goal?

Kindel: On the gaming side, I think the list we announced at Gamescom this year includes both those that are already on other platforms, and it includes some that are very unique to our platform. And there's more to come. We have a good balance there. On the app side, same thing. We're not ready to talk about some of these things, but I actually feel pretty good about it. We've got a good set of the staples, the ones you just expect. We've got a set of those that have some very unique capabilities. The one thing that almost all of those will have on our platform is that they are all beautiful. They're all going to take great advantage of the platform, and be engaging and beautiful like the rest of the phone. And then there's a set that you can't get anywhere else.

Q: Just to circle back, you're not literally paying cash to people to develop apps?

Kindel: No. We have developer programs, and we have programs where we have incentives for developers and marketing help and so forth. In some cases we connect the dots. We have a whole group of third-party development shops that are world-class and doing Silverlight and managed code development that we have now trained to do Windows Phone apps and design. We connect the dots. We'll have a developer who has a title that they want to get on Windows Phone, they don't necessarily have the expertise or the time, then we'll hook them up. We do a lot of that.

Q: What about Microsoft employees? There's a program encouraging them to develop apps. Are you seeing pockets of development inside the company?

Kindel: It was fun (Thursday night) I was at the Eastside Networking Event in Bellevue, I got invited to speak at that. I demo'd several apps on the phone, and I realized as I was doing it that it was the first time I had demo'd apps that our team hadn't built. Most of the apps I was showing were built by Microsoft employees. The beauty of that is I don't have to get permission from our big partners, like, do they really want to show it yet. One of the ones I showed was an RSS reader. This is called My RSS Reader, it was built by a Microsoft employee, and it is a front end to Google Reader.

Q: Now if an employee builds that, whose app is it? Is that a tricky issue internally?

Kindel: It is actually pretty tricky, and it's complicated because there are employment agreements, and there's moonlighting policies and all that stuff. But we've navigated those waters in such a way that we think we've allowed employees to have a great deal of flexibility. There are employees, out of the 90,000 or whatever that we have now at Microsoft, who look at this and go, wow, this is my chance to get rich. That's not the intent. The intent is, hey, you have some spare time. You're going to do this stuff anyway. Let's make sure you can do it where you're not breaking rules, and have fun, and learn.

Q: Microsoft's heritage in this market is in enterprise, corporate applications. How are you approaching enterprise applications for Windows Phone 7? Where are you in that process?

Kindel: We started with the principles of the phone itself, and what we're trying to do with the product. More and more smartphones are sold into the consumer market and then used for both the personal life and the business life of the user. They're taken into businesses. So we're enabling that for the developer platform, as well. We see a lot of development of both the (business to consumer) applications and applications that people will use within their business. Bringing the .NET platform to the phone and Silverlight, and the ability to build IT-type apps in Silverlight is absolutely something that we care about, and so we expect that we'll see a lot of that development.

Q: Will companies be able to take apps that they've built on Windows Mobile 6 and earlier platforms and move those up to Windows Phone 7 if they want to do a new phone deployment?

Kindel: It really depends on the app. If they wrote the app using .NET ... and they did a good job separating the business logic from the UI logic, then all they have to do is redo the UI logic and most of that business logic will just go right over, because it's just C#, .NET. If they didn't do such a good job of that, and it's much more of a spaghetti, ball-of-wax-type application, then it's a reengineering of that, and some of their code will move over. If it's not managed code, then it's a complete reengineering?

Q: Are you getting complaints from people who want full multitasking support for third-party apps in Windows Phone 7? Is that a request from third-party developers?

The way we think about it is there's a set of scenarios where end-users want to have things happen in the background. Whether the phone's in their pocket and doing something useful for them, or they're using an interesting app and something else is going on while they're using that app. We've designed the system to support a whole set of those scenarios. We hear from end users that there are other ones that they want us to support over time, and over time we'll continue to invest in that. From a developer's perspective, there are some scenarios we hear from developers that they want to do. We have some things in this platform we don't support, in this version. We hear that clearly from developers, we're always listening to that type of feedback.

Q: You've got a high-pressure job, but it also seems like it would be one of the more interesting jobs at Microsoft right now. You were in Windows Home Server before. How are you liking this?

Kindel: I had a great gig. I was able to do a startup inside Microsoft (Home Server) from the ground up, starting with me as the only person on that project through building it into an entire business at Microsoft. But most of my career prior to that had been focused on the developer, and I'd spent a bunch of time on the consumer, and the combination of those two things, made it so that it was a pretty good fit for me to come help on the Windows Phone effort. When I was asked to do this, I jumped at the chance. It was a bodacious project. At this point in time last year, I can't even say where we were.

What we have accomplished in this amount of time is phenomenal. Going in, we knew it would be one of these projects we would all remember for the rest of our lives. And so, I was extremely motivated to do it. The leadership -- everyone was on the same page of how we needed to change our game, and so there was a great esprit de corps there, and now it's all paying off. There are things we wish we could have done more of and so forth, but we keep being pleasantly surprised with how people react, so it's a blast.