While a smartphone might sport amazing hardware, having a good ecosystem is just as (if not more) important. This is evidenced by Apple and Google whereby both the iTunes App Store and Google Play feature hundreds of thousands of apps that the user can choose from. Microsoft’s Windows Phone Marketplace might have recently hit 70,000 apps, but it looks like more apps might be needed if they hope to catch up to iOS and Android, and it it seems the good folks over at ZDNet have managed to get their hands on several slides from Microsoft’s marketing group that apparently reveal how the company would go about doing just that.
According to the slides, Microsoft will be putting up $10 million in marketing to promote competitors of apps whose developers aren’t building on the Windows Phone platform, promote both top and exclusive apps constantly, and instead of focusing on how many apps Windows Phone Marketplace has, they will instead attempt to focus on emphasizing quality over quantity and will push for mainstream pricing, i.e. $0.99 for regular apps that users of other platforms are paying. In the meantime, we can’t wait to see if Microsoft will be successful in closing the gap between the top 25 apps by the end of Q2 2012.
Filed in . Read more about Apps, Leaked, Microsoft and Windows Phone.