Why MS would have difficulty attracting Web Developers to Windows 8

James Ashley couldn’t have said it any better here

For all the angst expressed over the rise and decline of Silverlight in the Microsoft world, it was clear that, for the people at this [A List Apart] conference, Silverlight had never made any inroads. And why should it – Silverlight was able to deliver content to Macs but never actually had design or development tools that could run on the Mac. The Silverlight story basically ignored all the designers and developers who had made Flash dominant for so long on the web.

And the reason? MS never made it their job to listen to concerns of developers.

The HTML5 + jquery goodness story seems to be based on the notion that there is a huge reservoir of web developers out in the world that Microsoft can win over to becoming developers for their new operating system. Developers, developers, developers, right?

How is Steve Sinofsky and his PR team going to accomplish this? I’ve been through the looking glass; I’ve seen the other side and, quite frankly, those developers Microsoft wants to woo don’t want to have anything to do with Microsoft. While there’s an element of irrational contempt in all of this, it is also the result of many years of Microsoft not understanding the concerns of the other web community and even outright ignoring them.