Paul McDougall, InformationWeek
We’ve been very clear since the very first CES demos and forward that the ARM product won’t run any x86 applications,” said Stephen Sinofsky, president of Microsoft Windows unit, during a meeting with financial analysts Wednesday. Windows 8 for tablets runs on devices powered by chips designed by U.K.-based ARM. The desktop version runs on traditional, x86 chips from Intel and AMD.
Just in case there was any confusion.
Which means Microsoft has to start an application ecosystem from scratch on their Windows 8 tablet. I don’t think consumers will be too excited about an ecosystem with a shortage of apps. By the middle of next year the number of iPad apps should be up to about 150,000.
It’s super easy to write apps for. Should be interesting to see.
I’m hoping Microsoft can get their devs working on this. I’m guessing they’re investigating partnerships for specific vertical markets, too.
Except for the fact that in order to flip the existing software over to work on Arm it’s just going to take the minimal of tweaking. It’s not as if the syntax will be differen’t just the API’S.
Begs the question why Microsoft would include a legacy, Windows 7-like interface in the tablet version of Windows 8, which they clearly have. Why not stick with a Metro-only UI on tablets? Is there really a need for developers to create legacy desktop Windows-like applications for the tablet format?
Does it also mean that ARM tablets with Win8 won’t be able to run Flash (since the can’t run the x86 based IE10 and the metro IE10 doesn’t support plugins)?
In terms of difficulty, this will be a significantly easier transition for developers than the Mac from PowerPC to Intel (no endian change), and probably easier than the 64 bit transition as well (no required and significant type size changes, as far as I know).
So yeah, recompiling should be relatively easy. But there’s still the split personality disorder for the user to deal with.