This could be a good opportunity for Microsoft to dump a ton of legacy baggage in Windows 8. Windows developers will ultimately need to support ARM/x86 and the path of least resistance is going to be Microsoft's latest & greatest framework. Great time to draw a line in the sand and reinvent Windows. Microsoft can send the message to developers that if you want your app to run on Windows 8 you need to stop using that Windows 3.1 style font selection dialog box, stop barfing files all over random spots of the file system, stop using crappy early 90's style installers, etc.
The problem Microsoft faces is that the primary selling point of Windows is the third-party software... which won't run on ARM.<p>Solutions: all providers recompile for ARM (unmanageable). W8 emulates x86 (slow). W8 does very tricky JIT recompilation of x86 to ARM, as if it were a VM (amazing).<p>Launching <i>.Net</i> a few years back means that at least all software written for that is trivially retargeted. A clever (or serendipitous?) leveraging of its platform.<p>Apple tackled this problem differently: by banning alternative software platforms from iPhone/iPad, they rapidly created a substantial 3rd party software base of native apps from nothing.
One thing both Google and Apple might be getting wrong is if they won't let developers make serious money. They are both encouraging very low prices like $.99 for "apps", which might mean that a lot of interesting software will never be written for those systems.<p>Microsoft always allowed and encouraged application developers to make money from their Windows applications, even though a "cheap applications means we can sell more Windows" strategy would naively seem to make sense.<p>If I had to pick an OS winner, Android is still the one I would bet on, but with this move, Windows definitely seems to me like a more credible contender.<p>Max Klein wrote about this at one point, but he apparently deleted it. The post is cached here:<p><a href="http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:_6hkDvCzHMYJ:maxkle.in/why-im-investing-in-windows-phone-and-skippin/" rel="nofollow">http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:_6hkDvC...</a>
This feels awfully late given that Windows CE has supported ARM since 1996. I never understood why Microsoft was reluctant to get a full-blown XP running on ARM (minus the x86 & DOS hamstrings). Windows CE always felt like a precursor to something that Microsoft didn't have the vision to follow through with.
Uhh.
I accidentally searched reddit using this number for other posts about it, and then I refreshed the page and the site is down.<p>Am I being paranoid or did I accidentally break their server?