Anyone owning a computing device in the days of Microsoft's reign was able to use any programming language in existence (pretty much) to do development for their device. The APIs were accessible and libraries and technologies played with each other. Mostly because they were around some common lower denominator (e.g. a C or lower level API). You could install anyone's software without needing an intermediary. It was clear that you owned your device, you owned your software and you owned your data. They didn't force other software vendors to pay them a fee. It wasn't Microsoft that broke all that. Microsoft is only playing catch up there.
I don't know Windows Phone 8 at all but if all you're saying is right then that sucks and I won't defend Microsoft there.
SaaS is just another facet of this multi-pronged attack on the user.
You could use any programming language you wanted - as long as you ported the headers and import libs to it. The Windows SDK and other Microsoft SDKs supported only C (Microsoft's, not Borland's or Watcom's, nor GCC) and Visual Basic. Wanted to use Delhi and Borland didn't create import units yet? Too bad, you had that to do for yourself.
Which is similar situation today. Both iOS and Android have well defined ABIs. Do you want to use something, that is not oficially supported by respective vendors? You can create the bindings for yourself. Nobody is preventing you. For some languages it was done, for some it was not. Android by its nature supports anything that compiles into Java bytecode, so even the bindings problem is a less of an importance. (Yes, there could be problem with Clojure, because of different assumptions on the part of Clojure and the constrains on Android devices. Due to that, it will run, but very slowly).
You can install any apk on Android device, without any intermediary. On the other hand, Microsoft got Apple envy and does prevent you from installing any application on WP handset.
In today's mobile world, Apple and others could learn from the drawbacks of the desktop world and implement a "better" system, at least in some respects. It has certainly helped their revenue.
http://www.embarcadero.com/products/rad-studio/ios-developme...
http://scala-ide.org/docs/tutorials/androiddevelopment/index...
I'm guessing no.
The entire experience is a sorry joke. I'm a big fan of Delphi as far as a tool to produce good/fast/native apps goes. They really dropped the ball with the ios/android tools. They ripped off GPL code, causing multiple patches to "fix" mis-appropriated open source code, it's fairly obvious there is no money, and the only customers they have are the existing ones who have a bunch of greybeards with a lot of Delphi experience and nothing else who are desperate to pump out _something_ for the mobile market, but are unprepared to learn _anything_ new.
Sorry, I'm just bitter that they took a decent product (Delphi 7), and took a shit on it, and then continued to grind it into oblivion.
That last point is one of the reasons for why I switched away from iOS to Android. I have yet to encounter an Android phone that doesn't do Wifi tethering because the mobile career says so. And my prior mobile career also had the nerve to ask me for an extra 4 EUR per month for wifi tethering. It's my device damn it and I feel that Windows Phone is a shitty iOS replacement, without the sexy.
> How many languages can you use to write apps for your iPhone or Android device? Objective C and Java respectively and that's about it.
For targeting iOS you can actually use Ruby [1], C# [2], Java [3]. Many iOS games are using Lua for scripting. Speaking of which, Unity 3D is a platform for building games and you can use Javascript, C#, Boo or UnityScript (a sort of ActionScript). The problem with iOS is that Apple had artificial restrictions that disallowed virtual machines, so bytecode and virtual machines were out. I think they lifted those restrictions, though iOS is what I call a defective by design platform.
On Android there are no limits. People build stuff with Java, because it's the least painful path and works fairly well. Games are still being built with C++. I have used Scala and it works well. Many people are also building apps with JRuby and Clojure ... though Dalvik is not as capable as a real JVM, so dynamic stuff has performance issues.
Even if you target the browser, you can compile C++ to asm.js and for replacing Javascript there are full-featured replacements available that use Javascript as bytecode - like Dart or ClojureScript.
> server side development which is in a sense a niche
Err, what? 99.9% of all software being built today is either server-side or has indispensable business logic that's handled server-side.
> [Linux, server-side] could have co-existed with Microsoft perfectly happily
You're probably too young to remember all the shit Microsoft did to prevent Linux and the web as a platform from happening. That's OK, you'll live and learn.
[1] http://www.rubymotion.com/
[2] https://xamarin.com/studio
[3] http://www.robovm.org/