I'm all for the idea of universal apps. I'm all for the idea of Continuum. I'm just taking a developer point of view here. I'm trying to remove people's rose tinted glasses. It's all great stuff but how do you see this attracting developers?
I saw Mary Joe Foley's interview with the MS Devs on Channel 9 from Build and she posed that question directly to them. One of the interesting things they mentioned is that they can now offer all of their crazy Azure services as part of a package deal, and I think that is going to be a big strategy going forward. So forget the money directly dealing with users, but the discounts of hosting, data warehousing, BI, SQL services, etc, that MS can offer at deep discounts as part of negotiating to get app deals. And then you throw in the Android/IOS compilers they can offer, it's all part of the value proposition they can bring to companies.
So yes, the marketshare isn't there to attract automatically, but you throw in really cutting hosting/data costs of running a modern application across all platforms, and that could be significant.
But I do agree, unfortunately, esp. when it comes to the immediate future for WP here in the US and West, I don't see things changing much - in fact I think MS has pretty much come to the conclusion that for this generation, high end phones are a lost cause, but 'Windows Mobile' is really more about making small tablets more appealing. After being with WP since day 1, I'll be moving to a LG G4 here shortly.
I can only hope things can turn around and there is a WP to return to in the next year and a half or so.