We'll see whether or not (and how much) desktop apps and their developers become second-class citizens in the coming months and years. I'm betting it will happen. The lure of taking such a significant cut from every app sold has to be weighing heavily on a company that is rapidly running out of ways to make more money besides planned obsolescence.
What do you mean by "running out of ways to make more money"? Didn't MSFT post their highest revenue ever this year?
Also, even for Apple the app store doesn't seem to be a big profit center. I really think that consumer preference is driving the move to app stores, not greedy platform owners.
I didn't say they were running out of making money, but the days of just churning out a new version of Windows and Office every 2-3 years and counting on millions of reflexive upgrades are limited. And since more and more money spent on computing devices is _not_ being spent on devices where Microsoft has a dominant position (i.e., laptops and desktops and servers to a lesser extent), MS is rapidly losing market share even if their share of PCs is not substantially decreasing.
Microsoft's greatest competitor to Windows version X has been version x - 1 ever since XP came out (except for Windows 7 whose greatest competitor was version x - 2). With Windows 8, there is very, very little incentive to upgrade unless you want to use a touch-screen device. I would bet very few people even upgrade Window any more. 99% of the time they only get a new version of Windows when they get a new computer. I know that's been true for me for 10+ years, and I'm cool with that.
Consumer preference may be driving the move to app stores, but only because no other delivery mechanism provides that kind of end-user experience of being able to pick out an app, install it by pushing a button and knowing you're almost certainly not getting malware.
Oh, except for most Linux distros for the better part of 10 years.
