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And if they do it will be suicide as billions of dollars worth of systems and applications rely on X86 Windows.
More likely from watching what has been happening under Ballmer's reign at MSFT this is likely to be a "Hail Mary" to try to get them a chunk of the smartphone market but IMHO its a dumb move. You don't crap on a billion dollar cash cow to try to jam your foot in the door of a market where you have ZERO strengths and has two incumbents that are both very powerful AND have better brand identities. hell even my 71 year old non tech dad knows what Android is and Apple is a juggernaut in mobile with iPhone and iPad.
Look we ALL know why they are doing it, its because the MHz wars are over and the PC is a mature platform while ARM is just starting a MHz war of its own. But MSFT had tried repeatedly to break into that market, first with winCE then Zune and then WinPhone 7 but all their flailing and billions wasted barely got them even 5% of the market.
So I'd say Intel is right as the ONLY reason people turn to the windows brand is for Windows X86 programs which ARM simply won't have. if this strategy was gonna work it would have with WinPhone 7 which is a fine smartphone OS, but Android and Apple simply have the better brands in this space with much larger appstores and better product recognition.




Member since:
2006-02-01
Also, when the netbook were launched, they were shipped with a Linux system, and the #1 complain was that users could not install their favourite application. So it is likely that if people buy a ARM desktop/laptop, they might expect to be able to install non-metro application. Especially since I doubt non-geek people will understand the difference between ARM and x86 (they might actually believe that ARM is like AMD, a cheap version of Intel).
Tablets are an entirely different class of product, so buyers did not have the expectation to be able to run classic applications on them.
There is the slight possibility that they are actually switching the brand from Windows to Metro. Which, unlike what most geek thinks, is not something that can happen overnight. Especially when you want to replace such a strong brand as "Windows", so for now, it is "Windows Metro", but I would not be surprised if for the next release it is just "Metro".