Quote:
Originally Posted by kartu
How big was the market for all those platforms combined? Compare that to Arm world.
With Visual Studio that can cross platform and actual demand for applications on non-x86 CPUs (assuming, people would actually use windows on Arm  ), I pity Intel.
Who's locked to Wintel at the moment? Gaming crowd (DirectX), MS Office users. "I just want to browser web/ watch video/check emails" consumers will be swept away from wintel to tablets and co. MS just doesn't want to go down with x86, it's not much of an anti-intel move. |
That aside, you still had the problem with putting the burden of support onto the third party. Also how many people will get upset because they buy an ARM device with Windows 8, and find that they cannot run apps they can on their copy of Windows 8 on a x86 machine? The way Windows binaries have always been, is that they only run on the platform that they were compiled for. x86 binaries only run on x86 compatible systems, x86-64 only run on 64 bit compatible machines, etc. Hell, there are still plenty of developers out there that do not produce 64bit binaries (despite tools like Visual Studio having the ability to compile for 64bit systems), which causes problems at times (used to be that 64 bit versions of Windows required 64 bit drivers, regardless of their ability to run 32 bit software). Unless Microsoft seriously does some hard core push for support, the ARM version will languish behind the x86 versions, due to lack of third party support. Pretty much, unless you force people to go out of their way to not support something, devs will not support a minority product.