Microsoft Adopts About 1,000 webOS Orphans

Microsoft may be a big company but it’s not always going to be caught flat-footed. On the heels of HP’s decision to kill off its webOS hardware, Microsoft’s Windows Mobile team quickly stepped in to take advantage of the vacuum.

Brandon Watson, a director for Windows Phone 7 developer relations, sent out an alluring tweet on Friday, offering stranded webOS developers free tools and training on Windows Phone.

“To Any Published WebOS Devs: We’ll give you what you need to be successful on #WindowsPhone, incl.free phones, dev tools, and training, etc” he said on Friday.

Watson gave out his e-mail address and invited developers to contact him. He may regret that. Soon he was referring them to a MSDN link, although the bulk of his Twitter feed over the weekend was simply responding personally to each request.

“I’m floored at the number of replies and emails [from] webOS developers looking for a home. I’ll personally answer each one. You deserve it,” he wrote. At least one was from Palm. “A Palm dev relations person sent me an email asking for a job. Can’t wait to talk to him,” he wrote. 

By Monday, thanks to stories on WinRumors and Engadget, a new flood began and he reported he’d been contacted by more than 1,000 developers.

Windows Phone isn’t exactly setting the world on fire, but it’s doing better than HP, and if there’s one thing Microsoft does well is support its developer community. TouchPad had some really nice apps and features, and if some of them migrate to Windows Phone, so much the better for Microsoft. Windows Phone has gone from zero to 30,000 apps since it launched last fall.

And just remember, while Brandon is recruiting for Windows Phone, those are both Pre and TouchPad developers he’s talking to, and Windows 8 is right around the corner and will be tablet-ready.

Brandon might want to get a little help handling all that traffic from developers, though.