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Alas, is that really a good thing? As it stands, the platforms are wildly differing in specs and therefore you're limiting yourself on how you can present yourself to the end-user and how the end-user can interact with you. Personally I don't view it as a positive thing; Metro is way, way too limited on an actual PC and one has to interact with it by emulating touch-screen gestures -- I do not view a unified experience worth the losses in ease-of-use and features.

I think that times are changing. The mouse will augment the touch experience instead of touch augmenting the mouse experience, in pretty short order.

OEMs are finally getting around to less brainddead form factors and I think there's a shift in how people use their devices occurring.

Intel will in the near future require all devices bearing the Ultrabook name to support things like Touch, NFC, and other sensors + protocols. The difference between our traditional devices and our mobile devices are becoming less pronounced.

Add to that the fact that Intel continues to aggressively push into ultra low power, even with their Core series, and you start to get a compelling story for pushing for a unified ecosystem.

Metro and the WinRT will evolve. I'm sure it will contain a bunch of Mouse and Keyboard specific improvements and some more flexibility in the near future.

I wasn't making a call on whether it was good or bad. The OP said "what's the difference?". I was listing the differences.

I personally think that it's the future, whether we like it or not. I think the rest will eventually follow suit.

Well, I can think of several reasons:

1. Firstly, and most importantly; Microsoft Office. Corporate users live and breathe MS Office. And, while the full office suite isn't available yet on RT, it will be, and that's going to be a huge draw for lots of people.

And no, OOo isn't a real substitute. You know it. I know it. Everybody knows it. "

I'll have to strongly disagree. Corporate users live and breathe a subset of MS Office, which for the most part is completely replaceable by OpenOffice.org or LibreOffice. I'm not saying that is always the case, of course, but I have personally seen it done many times with zero training. It worked fine and it costed nothing. It is wrong to assume people specifically need MS Office for their office computing needs.

Besides, corporate users need to use more corporate products besides MS Office and those do not work in Windows RT, so promoting it is a moot point.

It's completely replaceable if you're just talking about writing documents or spreadsheets. But, of course, no companies do just that, so it isn't replaceable at all.

I have worked for loads of high profile companies and none, repeat none, would ever consider OOo in a million years. The main reasons are the massive IP investment they all have in MS Office.

For example the tight integration with TFS and Sharepoint that you don't get with OOo. And then there are the inevitable crap-tonne of Access and Excel VBA apps that run everything from timesheets to monitoring billion dollar LNG modules as I discovered in horror at Chevron.

It's not an option.

By which of course you mean they live and breathe the proprietary and incompatible MS Office file formats. Not that I dispute your claim, I just felt the need to clarify the situation.


Future, unannounced and speculated about products aren't valid reasons to purchase a computer now, are they?


Er, not really. Android on phones and tablets is already converged and it's just a question of when it will make the hop to even larger computing platforms still (a step it has arguably already taken - plenty of tablets allow HDMI output and keyboard+mouse input and the results work quite alright).


This is all great, but it's subjective and it's not something that will force users to do a platform and ecosystem change. "We believe feature X is 5% better on our devices!" isn't something that will get average Joe's attention. For that you have to have total killers, something nobody else can do at all (e.g. Android's openness, low price, different handset styles, Apple's polish, cool factor, etc.). From what I can see Microsoft is trying to literally poise themselves in between the two, but if you're just a tiny dude between two heavyweights, chances are you'll just get squashed.


And I totally believe you.. (just kidding)

Do you really, seriously believe that MS will not port their primary draw, and second most profitable piece of software to the platform?

I mean they are currently working on metrofying Office already! It's pretty obvious.



Future, unannounced and speculated about products aren't valid reasons to purchase a computer now, are they?



Notice how I never said that it would. The OP asked why anyone would possibly buy a Win8 device over the competition. I provided some reasons why they might

Edited 2013-01-09 23:36 UTC