Too big for your boots!

Okay, so Microsoft produced a great product in Windows 7, and a good, but rough product with Windows 8. Windows 8 feels like early Windows XP in some ways, given a few updates to the OS, it could be great.  In fact if you factor in what they're trying to achieve with Win 8, it's pretty darn good.  Nobody else has even come close to being able to unify a desktop and mobile OS yet.

Anyway, so one of the quirks of Windows 8 is the App Store, which bears a few problems that stem from Microsoft's apparent need to be more 'Apple-like' (for reasons known only to them). The Apple App Store model is primarily an online retail beast, designed to sell software to individuals, rather than entities like corporations so it baffles me when I try to understand why Microsoft have decided to replicate that at the expense of the large installations (like businesses and schools, for example) that they've gone to great lengths to help over the years.
One might think that if your modus operandi was to develop software with these organisations in mind that you might build in some features appropriate to them. Failing that, one might think that you'd at least try not to make it IMPOSSIBLE to use!

If you're not following, what I'm referring to is the complete inability to purchase apps from the app store on any basis other than a purely individual one. Something that schools in particular, require. Currently the only way to buy an app in the Windows Store is to use a credit card or Paypal. So if you're a teacher who's identified a paid app you'd like your students to use, you might find that few of your cohort of 12 year-olds have their AmEx handy!
Microsoft have in their organisation a division (business unit, or whatever they call them) called Volume Licensing whose concern is to help people purchase, access and deploy their software en masse.  So you could be forgiven for thinking that maybe, if you were setting up a store to sell software (en masse), you might include the expertise of this division.
But if you did think that you'd be wrong, because if you're a business, school or some other group and you want to buy an app for all in your organisation you have absolutely no way of doing so. None. I know you can side-load apps from the store, but only if the app developer creates a specific type of package and sells it to you using some method other than the store. I somehow don't think that makers of simple educational apps are going to be bothered with doing that.

Have Microsoft thought about what this does to their App ecosystem at all I wonder? If I put myself in the shoes of a developer of a popular Windows 8 Store App targeted at education I have two choices when putting my app in the store. I can a) release it for free, taking the kudos and no money, or b) put it up as a paid app that students can't buy, have no-one download it and still not make any money.
Forget distributing it as an appx package, no one is going to do that apart from the big software houses, and why should they have to? Have Apple beaten Microsoft at their own game by having a Volume Licensing scheme for their own apps?

In trying to research this problem we've spoken to Microsoft employees at the App Store, and Volume Licensing (two divisions which in true MS style, don't appear to talk to each other). Our question to the app store about this problem was met with a bemused "we'd never thought of that" response. Moreover, the person at the App Store helpfully suggested that a way to purchase apps for a group of students might be to purchase them all under one account, then you can just install a copy on each machine from that account. Great, until we mentioned the device-limit of 5 installs per app (yes, believe it or not we had to tell them about their own limit). So the app store people failed us, and the volume licensing people told us it wasn't their problem.

It turns out there might be a solution on the horizon, albeit a bad one. But frustratingly the people at the app store didn't know that literally days after asking them the question "can we give students some sort of voucher to buy their apps with" and being told "no", that we soon will be able to. Pending reliability of The Verge and its sources, we've discovered there will be a voucher available soon that works across all Microsoft stores that we can give to kids to buy apps. It's still not the most elegant solution, but at least it's something (albeit essentially where the Apple store was at 3 years ago).

[caption id="attachment_158" align="aligncenter" width="423"] Real or fantasy? The unconfirmed Microsoft giftcard, according to The Verge.[/caption]

So, I'll finish this off by inviting Apple and Google fanbois a rare opportunity. I know you love to laugh at Microsoft when you get the chance, so pull up a seat and poke some fun at the Redmond clowns with me over this insulting oversight.

UPDATE: - No more news on the gift-card concept.  Either it's planned for release alongside Windows 8.1 or The Verge were merely peddling their usual quality of rumour.

UPDATE 2: - This feature of Microsoft SCCM 2012 SP1 looks quite promising.  No indication that it can handle paid apps at this stage but I'd bet that's in the works.