Content-wise, the good thing is that there is quite some information here. One thing that caught my attention is the phrase <i>"Metro style apps available from Microsoft that support a wide variety of industry-standard media and document formats"</i>. It made me wonder whether we will see a PDF viewer from Microsoft.<p>Style-wise, as often when reading MS 'blog posts', I wonder how many marketeers were in the committee writing it. This post is way longer than its content deserves, with repeated almost content-free adjectives such as "unique" or "intrinsic". To make things worse, it seems to suffer from serious copy-paste errors (for examples, search for "has a very high degree of commonality" or "enables creativity").<p>The post also sometimes almost conflicts with itself due to what I imagine to be marketing forces. For example: <i>"WOA builds on the foundation of Windows"</i> vs "With WOA you can look forward to integrated, end-to-end products—hardware, firmware and WOA software, all built from the ground up"<p>I also found it funny to read <i>"of what we call, for the purposes of this post, Windows on ARM, or WOA"</i>. Are they really thinking that will prevent people from calling it WOA elsewhere? In a similar vein, we have <i>"Note: This is not a product plan or even a hint at a product."</i> and <i>"(which are not the subject of this post)"</i> Phrases like that belong in a press release, not in a blog post.<p>As a final reason why I do not like the writing style, I had to laugh when, over 1300 words in the article, I find "This post is organized with the following sections"
I was wondering how Intel was liking the Windows on Arm development. The third paragraph of this is a bit telling in that regard. It's hard to tell if it's a shoutout to Intel/AMD to assuage their fears or just an acknowledgement of the work everyone put into it as a whole. Either way, it reads as a "don't worry, Intel, you still matter to us!"
<i>Sinofsky also said that the Windows-on-ARM machines will come with several Office apps — Word, PowerPoint, Excel and OneNote — that have been tuned to run in a very battery-efficient manner. But Sinofsky said that, although those applications will run in the traditional Windows desktop, they will be the only programs allowed to do so, other than components of Windows itself.</i> [1]<p>I'm still trying to wrap my head around this one... why would they limit the OS, instead of saying that Metro was it, and have the Office15 team build out Metro versions of their applications?<p>Having the desktop/classic mode be only for built-in utilities and Office seems, at best, <i>extremely</i> short sighted.<p>[1] <a href="http://allthingsd.com/20120209/windows-on-arm-complete-with-next-version-of-office-to-arrive-with-rest-of-windows-8/" rel="nofollow">http://allthingsd.com/20120209/windows-on-arm-complete-with-...</a>
If I get this right, the only apps you will be able to run in the Desktop are:<p>- Internet Explorer 10<p>- Office 15 (Word, Excel, PowerPoint, OneNote). What about Outlook, Visio, etc.?<p>- Windows Explorer<p>- Wordpad? Solitaire? Remote Desktop Client?<p>And that's it.<p>If I want to, say, unrar or un-7z a file I just downloaded, I'll need to go back to a Metro 7z app to do that?<p>Or what if I want to use Chrome or Firefox? Does this even comply with Microsoft's EU obligations (the browser ballot, etc.)?<p>Leaving the desktop environment only available to Microsoft apps is a very slippery slope, and I think it'll be a serious point of contention for developers and users. It really has to be all-or-nothing.
I'm glad they finally released good details on what is and isn't possible on Win8/ARM. My takeaway from this is: while they're not doing it, nothing is stopping someone from emulating Win/x86 applications on ARM. I've been playing around with doing it (nothing serious, just working through some of the tech challenges and using it as an excuse to learn LLVM better) and while there are challenges, it's definitely not insurmountable.<p>I have a feeling that if Win8/ARM takes off, this could be a big market -- maybe I should take it a bit more seriously.
<i>"End-users are technically restricted from installing a different OS (or OS version) on a device or extending the OS, so this is generally not possible, and rarely supported by the device maker. "</i><p>and<p><i>"We architected our approach to ensure that software and peripherals can all benefit from the diversity enabled by the ARM architecture, along with the choice of form factors and manufacturers, and the openness of the platform."</i><p>seem to be in conflict. How is my being unable to install an OS a good thing? These comments (along with later mention of UEFI and some other things) cause me some discomfort.<p>Well, looks like Apple won the hearts and minds of consumers--we now are looking at a future with much greater integration of software and hardware and much less freedom. Thanks folks.<p>EDIT: To clear up potential confusion, I'm not saying that what Apple did was not good business or that their success was totally bad--I merely am pointing out that the tight UX pushed by that company (and then aped to varying degrees by others) has out of necessity driven things in this direction.<p>EDIT2: <i>"In fact, WOA only supports running code that has been distributed through Windows Update along with the full spectrum of Windows Store applications."</i> Oh goody.
...and locking out Linux (and other open source operating systems) with the help of the UEFI secure boot.<p><a href="http://arstechnica.com/business/news/2012/01/microsoft-mandating-secure-boot-on-arm-making-linux-installs-difficult.ars" rel="nofollow">http://arstechnica.com/business/news/2012/01/microsoft-manda...</a>
Biggest takeaway is that everything is a PC. That ARM tablet you're holding in your arm? It's a full PC and won't be artificially crippled to being a consumption device only. Plug in or a dock a keyboard/mouse and you get the full notebook experience.
I think the video is an insight into the quality of Apple vs. Microsoft products. Apple would never let out a low quality product video like the one linked in this article. They didn't even have a decent microphone for the video and I was distracted by background static. Apple's culture embraces every aspect of a product's launch, with a product video being clean and simple just like their end products.