For the general market I don't believe ARM will get far until there's a Windows ARM port available. I'm a 100% Linux user and my Atom netbook is a pain-free ex

For the general market I don't believe ARM will get far until there's a Windows ARM port available. I'm a 100% Linux user and my Atom netbook is a pain-free experience. All software (including Flash and Skype) works out of the box as intended. Compared that to my experience of running Linux on PPC where even open source software didn't always work perfectly. The experience for a Windows user is even more extreme; they are comparing a Windows machine which is the target/test platform for every vendor, to a Linux ARM machine where most software can be kind of sort of made to work, if you try hard enough. Atom's x86 ISA makes all that pain go away. With battery life in atom systems beating 8 hours (i.e. a full days work and charge over night) there pain reduction of moving to ARM isn't as big as gaining binary compatibility. The only people to whom this doesn't apply are Apple, who have two key things: - A much stronger control over their platform and developers. - Developers who are already used to multi-platform development thanks to PPC fat binaries and shared libraries between the iPhone and OS X. Therefore I believe it will be necessary for Microsoft to _really_ support an ARM port before Atom is in any danger at all. And right now their chips are frankly good enough that I can't see Microsoft really being that motivated.