Microsoft Paying Developers for Windows Phone Apps isn't New

　　In fact, you shouldn't be at-all surprised by the practice. Bloomberg Businessweek's Ashlee Vance let slip in an article this past week that Microsoft is paying developers "$100,000 or more" to build apps for its Windows Phone platform – a lovely incentive, sure, for those whose budgets are too constrained or engineering staff is too busy to port a popular app over to Windows phones.
　　However, it's important to clarify that Microsoft isn't doing anything new, as Vance's report – and the subsequent follow-ups written by other journalistic entities – might indicate. Microsoft has been paying developers for their attention, talent, and app-creation abilities for some time now, and the figure goes a lot higher than $100,000.
　　In an article published in April of last year, the New York Times' Jenna Wortham and Nick Wingfield noted that, "Microsoft is so determined to have lots of brand-name apps for its Windows Phone app store that it is willing to pay for them." The incentive, described further down in the article, can include a payment of anywhere from $60,000 to $600,000 "depending on the complexity of the app."
　　While this sounds like a subtle kind of bribery, Microsoft's incentives have managed to achieve noteworthy results that benefit developers and consumers alike. Take Foursquare, the example called out in the Times' article from last year. Without the financial boost – in this case, paying for an outside company
　　to port Foursquare's app over to the Windows Phone platform – Foursquare would likely not exist on Windows phones, period.
　　Since then, the Microsoft Store has ballooned up from around 70,000 apps and games to 145,000. And perhaps that number has also been boosted a bit by Microsoft's second promotional program to encourage developer interest: A bounty program that gave developers a $100 Visa gift card for every app they published to the Microsoft Store, up to $2,000 worth of total rewards, between March 9 and June 30 of this year.
　　Of course, Microsoft isn't the only manufacturer that's sought to woo developers with the promises of cold, hard cash. RIM doubled the reward pool to $2 million for those participating in its final "Port-A-Thon" program in January of this year — that's after the company saw more than 15,000 apps submitted over a one-and-a-half-day period in its previous "Port-A-Thon" event. Those building or porting apps were eligible to earn $100 for each, up to a maximum of $2,000, for each app that was accepted into the BlackBerry World app store.