“How does once-hot mobile phone maker Motorola plan to capture developers’ attention away from Apple’s iPhone and Google’s Android platforms? Good, old-fashioned bribery, of course,” Dan Frommer reports for Silicon Alley Insider.
“Motorola’s new “Widget Developer Challenge” will award lucky winners prizes up to $25,000 and ‘global exposure.’ All you have to do is join Motorola’s developer program, learn their widget system, make something cool, and if you’re lucky, profit,” Frommer reports.
“And then plan to forget everything you’ve learned — because Motorola will be throwing it away anyway,” Frommer reports.
Full article here.
[Thanks to MacDailyNews Reader “Ken” for the heads up.]
Only a company with its collective head up its ass as far as Motorola’s is would run a contest offering prize money to develop for a platform that they’re dumping next year. This gives new meaning to the term “killer app.” If your goal is to develop for a dead platform (and company, for that matter) then have at it, otherwise stick with the iPhone SDK – that’s where the real money and real futures can be found.
In May 2007, Motorola’s then-Chairman and then-CEO Ed Zander boasted that his company was ready for competition from Apple’s iPhone, due out the following month. “How do you deal with that?” Zander was asked at the Software 2007 conference. Zander quickly retorted, “How do they deal with us?”
