4 ms·

Windows 8 to introduce ARM; First Public Demonstration Expected This Week

65 points by andre3k1 16y ago

sliverstorm 16y ago
Anyone have insight on whether this is Microsoft gunning at mobile platforms, or loosing faith in the dominance of x86?
- mycroftiv 16y ago
  You pose the question as if those two things were contradictory, but aren't they really synonymous? I think everyone expects that the majority of computers sold in the next few years will be sold in the form of smartphones and tablets, and ARM dominates those markets.
- rbanffy 16y ago
  You can smell their fear. As long as I can buy an ARM-based netbook subsidized by crapware/adware on Windows 8 and replace the thing with a decent OS, I'll be happy. Sadly, I won't be able to brag about using a Windows-proof computer anymore... Now, seriously, Windows failed once on RISC platforms because software vendors were not interested in supporting them. Can an ARM-based Windows desktop function when the only software it runs is Windows? And, perhaps, Office? Would a Windows user live without 3rd-party software? Would all 3rd-parties rush to support Windows on ARM? I doubt it. And, of course, it reminds me of FUD maneuvers of the past, like Windows for Pen Computing. It may well be designed to prevent people from seriously considering moving to Android (or classic Linux) on ARM-based platforms "because Windows 8 will support ARM and is just around the corner". Seen it before. And it worked, BTW.
  - deleted 16y ago
    [deleted]
    - rbanffy 16y ago
      > Windows failed on RISC because when x86 proved too competitive I remember distinctly how much faster Alpha-based workstations were in comparison to its Pentium Pro cousins. Unfortunately, I couldn't run many programs I had to (Office, for instance, ran under emulation, at Pentium-like speeds). I could run SQL Server and pretty much that was it. And notepad. And Minesweeper. I can imagine a niche for high-density ARM-based servers running IIS, but, unless licensing is very cheap, I cannot imagine someone paying for Windows on four ARM blades when the same Windows on one x86 blade could do the same work. When licensing is a big part of the whole stack, the hardware evolves in weird, sometimes unpractical, ways. That happened before too. When the most common Windows version (because it could run lots of popular software), was the 9x series, x86 processors were under specific evolutionary pressures and ended up with deep pipelines and insanely high clocks to remain acceptably fast until past 2000 (and entered an evolutionary dead-end). At the same time, RISC-based boxes that ran Unix routinely had more than one processor since the low 90's. I always thought it interesting that by the time AMD64 was announced, I was retiring our 5-year-old 64-bit mail server.
      - kenjackson 16y ago
        But there is the Cortex A-15 which puts ARM in the Intel perf ballgame. Not surprisingly, I've heard grumblings for nearly the past decade of an ARM version of Windows in various states of stability. It will be interesting to see how far along this is. The issue with x86 and clocks had little do with Windows, and more with the Blue Crystal effect (MHz sell CPUs not perf). There's a great insider book about this called "The Pentium Chronicles" by the chief architect of the P6.
        rbanffy 16y ago
        And yet, the most popular Windows version couldn't do anything with the dual and quad-processor boxes being sold. Clock number marketing had its share, but the lack of an OS that could run most games or support a lot of the hardware already out (I had a couple gizmos that didn't work under NT) certainly didn't help the evolution of multi-processor x86s. As late as XP-time, most of my friends who were serious about gaming dual booted their boxes between 2000/XP for work and 98 for gaming. For them, a multi-processor workstation would be useless half the time. For most of 1999/2000, I worked on an IBM PC Server 320 with two Pentium 200 processors and found it was wonderfully "smoother" than the 400MHz P2 (or 3, can't remember that) users who didn't run NT had. I cannot picture myself being happy on a single threaded machine anymore.
  - sliverstorm 16y ago
    Can an ARM-based Windows desktop function when the only software it runs is Windows? They've done a half-decent enough job with Windows 7 to get people to move from XP, even when app support is patchy. Offer some compatibility, so that people don't rule out switching, but not enough compatibility to allow the software makers to remain complacent... That's the trick. They have a ton of resources, and some half-decent developers, maybe they'll introduce an x86 compatibility layer.
    - rbanffy 16y ago
      > introduce an x86 compatibility layer. On ARM?! ARM is not so fast. I can imagine ARM reaching Atom on single-thread performance, but nothing near Sandy Bridge. That said, DEC had it for the Alpha, but only because the Alpha made the Pentium look like a toy. And it was not fun to run Pentium software at Pentium speeds on what was supposedly a very fast computer.
  - gpjt 16y ago
    Now, seriously, Windows failed once on RISC platforms because software vendors were not interested in supporting them. Can an ARM-based Windows desktop function when the only software it runs is Windows? I guess a lot depends on how much developers embrace .NET; .NET apps are compiled to CLR bytecode which presumably could run on ARM devices just as easily as on Intel.
    - rbanffy 16y ago
      > CLR bytecode which presumably could run on ARM devices just as easily as on Intel. It's doubtful if performance would not degrade so much as to make desktop software made to run on the x86 .NET runtime unacceptably slow on ARM.
      - teyc 16y ago
        The most CPU demanding work on a mobile phone is actually the user interface, and on WP7 this is offloaded to hardware. I see no reason why ARM tablets running Windows would be necessarily slower.
        rbanffy 16y ago
        I can't imagine Windows 8 as a mobile platform.
        teyc 16y ago
        We can all hear the collective groan when Steve Balmer said table PCs will run Windows. I don't question his devotion to Microsoft, but I seriously wished he has a bit more imagination.
    - ot 16y ago
      Windows phone 7 is based on .NET, so they already have an ARM backend for the runtime.
      - rbanffy 16y ago
  - harshpotatoes 16y ago
    Be fair now, these hypothetical arm devices can't both be filled with bloat/crapware and not be supported by 3rd party app developers.
    - rbanffy 16y ago
      Good point. So, they probably won't have subsidies. That'll make the Linux versions cheaper.
- celoyd 16y ago
  If they expect mobile platforms keep growing and to keep not using x86, they can expect both of those by the same token.
- yason 16y ago
  They've probably seen that: - ARM chiops are soon at desktop speeds; further, there are dual-core and quad-core ARM chips in the near future - Laptops have been fast enough for years that customers can trade off some speed in favor of much longer battery life - They see synergetic advances in gluing together mainline Windows and Windows Phone with ARM platforms: ARM is certainly going to be a player, they're certain that ARM based minilaptops, netbooks, and tablets, when they become closer to mainstream, are going to eat away market share from Windows/x86
  - masklinn 16y ago
    > ARM chiops are soon at desktop speeds Frequencies, not speeds.
    - regularfry 16y ago
      That depends what you mean by "speeds." I used an ARM3-based desktop machine for a while 15 years ago. Personally I think it's a meaningless comparison, but there you go.
      - masklinn 16y ago
        > That depends what you mean by "speeds." Same as everybody else, the ratio between an amount of stuff S and the time T it takes to execute a set of operations P on it > I used an ARM3-based desktop machine for a while 15 years ago. So? > Personally I think it's a meaningless comparison, but there you go. It's not so much meaningless as irrelevant. I interpreted "ARM chiops are soon at desktop speeds" to mean "ARM speeds are soon at [processing] speeds corresponding to x86 desktop machines at equivalent prices" which definitely isn't the case, not by a long shot. Soon at desktop frequencies yes (the A15 is advertised at up to 2.5GHz while retail desktop CPUs have been stuck under the 4GHz barrier for more than 5 years), performance per watt definitely (ARM has blown x86 away forever there) but actual, raw computational speed not really.
        regularfry 16y ago
themrbluesky 16y ago
Uhh. I accidentally searched reddit using this number for other posts about it, and then I refreshed the page and the site is down. Am I being paranoid or did I accidentally break their server?
- andre3k1 16y ago
  Try Techmeme. Here's the discussion on this topic: http://techme.me/B0l1 http://techme.me/B0l1
jsz0 16y ago
This could be a good opportunity for Microsoft to dump a ton of legacy baggage in Windows 8. Windows developers will ultimately need to support ARM/x86 and the path of least resistance is going to be Microsoft's latest & greatest framework. Great time to draw a line in the sand and reinvent Windows. Microsoft can send the message to developers that if you want your app to run on Windows 8 you need to stop using that Windows 3.1 style font selection dialog box, stop barfing files all over random spots of the file system, stop using crappy early 90's style installers, etc.
- kes 16y ago
  This might be a stupid question, but that's exactly like the OSX/OS9 switch, right?
  - varaon 16y ago
    Yes, and MS already has something similar to Classic mode. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_Virtual_PC#Windows_XP_Mode http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_Virtual_PC#Windows_XP_M...
  - wtallis 16y ago
    It would be more like the OS 9 -> OS X switch happening at the same time as the PPC -> Intel transition, but without the old CPU architecture being totally deprecated. Apple's notable for having made 3 major transitions (68k to PPC, MacOS to OS X, and PPC to Intel), but all three of those were as minimal as they could be given the circumstances. The architecture transitions were made with almost completely transparent binary compatibility and minimal changes needed for source code, while the source-incompatible OS/API change was made as gradual as possible with a long grace period (which a few companies chose to exploit rather than update their apps before it was too late). Windows as a system is clearly not clean enough at the moment to easily switch architectures without needing a lot of complex compatibility stuff thrown in. If they try to force developers off old APIs and introduce a new architecture, that new architecture will be a second class citizen and will need a lot of external factors to give it traction.
    - 16y ago
pohl 16y ago
I wonder if this is why Intel unveiled Sandy Bridge a few days early.
6ren 16y ago
The problem Microsoft faces is that the primary selling point of Windows is the third-party software... which won't run on ARM. Solutions: all providers recompile for ARM (unmanageable). W8 emulates x86 (slow). W8 does very tricky JIT recompilation of x86 to ARM, as if it were a VM (amazing). Launching .Net a few years back means that at least all software written for that is trivially retargeted. A clever (or serendipitous?) leveraging of its platform. Apple tackled this problem differently: by banning alternative software platforms from iPhone/iPad, they rapidly created a substantial 3rd party software base of native apps from nothing.
- ippisl 16y ago
  Moore's law probably gives them enough speed to use x86 for very old software , .net gives them good results for new software .
- ippisl 16y ago
  Moore's law probably gives them enough speed to use x86 for very old software , .net gives them good results for new software .
- erik 16y ago
  I believe that DEC (Compaq?) shipped very capable JIT recompilation of x86 to Alpha a long time ago. They were trying to get past the hurdle of Intel's lock in. It didn't work.
  - bbgm 16y ago
    And SGI tried something similar on their MIPS processors. That didn't work either
    - wazoox 16y ago
      Actually they shipped some of their workstations with softwindows 95 (which in the meanwhile, became Virtual PC, then was bought by Microsoft). It was close to usable on really fast machines :)
  - 16y ago
dstein 16y ago
This feels awfully late given that Windows CE has supported ARM since 1996. I never understood why Microsoft was reluctant to get a full-blown XP running on ARM (minus the x86 & DOS hamstrings). Windows CE always felt like a precursor to something that Microsoft didn't have the vision to follow through with.
- rbanffy 16y ago
  > I never understood why Microsoft was reluctant to get a full-blown XP running on ARM Because they tried (and failed to gain traction) before with MIPS, PowerPC, Alpha and Itanium.
  - razzmataz 16y ago
    NT originally ran on MIPS, before it ever ran on 386.
    - rbanffy 16y ago
      And that's why there never was an Office for MIPS...
      - razzmataz 16y ago
        Actually, the reason for Office never being ported came down to two things: different byte order and lots of x86 assembly mixed in the office code for performance reasons. Office was never 'portable'.
ssp 16y ago
One thing both Google and Apple might be getting wrong is if they won't let developers make serious money. They are both encouraging very low prices like $.99 for "apps", which might mean that a lot of interesting software will never be written for those systems. Microsoft always allowed and encouraged application developers to make money from their Windows applications, even though a "cheap applications means we can sell more Windows" strategy would naively seem to make sense. If I had to pick an OS winner, Android is still the one I would bet on, but with this move, Windows definitely seems to me like a more credible contender. Max Klein wrote about this at one point, but he apparently deleted it. The post is cached here: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:_6hkDvCzHMYJ:maxkle.in/why-im-investing-in-windows-phone-and-skippin/ http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:_6hkDvC...
- masklinn 16y ago
  > They are both encouraging very low prices like $.99 for "apps" Please do explain how. Apple at least (I don't know about the Marketplace, apart from it not being available to a number of developers) has a wide range of available prices, there are GPS software for far north of $100 apiece, and a number of other applications which definitely aren't $.99. Even in games, "big hits" are generally closer to $10 (when not on sale) than $1 (and outlining this kind of stuff is very much why Apple introduced a third "tops" list in the appstore). And please also explain how Microsoft would solve a race to the bottom which is the combination of users being cheap fucks and developers still wanting those users. > Max Klein wrote about this at one point, but he apparently deleted it. The post is cached here: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:_6hkDvC… http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:_6hkDvC... Doesn't say anything about iOS, and completely handwaves away the problem for Microsoft (apparently, microsoft "cares that he's making money" and will moneyhat him or something). Garbage.

65 points by andre3k1 16y ago

sliverstorm 16y ago

Anyone have insight on whether this is Microsoft gunning at mobile platforms, or loosing faith in the dominance of x86?

mycroftiv 16y ago
You pose the question as if those two things were contradictory, but aren't they really synonymous? I think everyone expects that the majority of computers sold in the next few years will be sold in the form of smartphones and tablets, and ARM dominates those markets.
rbanffy 16y ago
You can smell their fear. As long as I can buy an ARM-based netbook subsidized by crapware/adware on Windows 8 and replace the thing with a decent OS, I'll be happy. Sadly, I won't be able to brag about using a Windows-proof computer anymore... Now, seriously, Windows failed once on RISC platforms because software vendors were not interested in supporting them. Can an ARM-based Windows desktop function when the only software it runs is Windows? And, perhaps, Office? Would a Windows user live without 3rd-party software? Would all 3rd-parties rush to support Windows on ARM? I doubt it. And, of course, it reminds me of FUD maneuvers of the past, like Windows for Pen Computing. It may well be designed to prevent people from seriously considering moving to Android (or classic Linux) on ARM-based platforms "because Windows 8 will support ARM and is just around the corner". Seen it before. And it worked, BTW.
- deleted 16y ago
  [deleted]
  - rbanffy 16y ago
    > Windows failed on RISC because when x86 proved too competitive I remember distinctly how much faster Alpha-based workstations were in comparison to its Pentium Pro cousins. Unfortunately, I couldn't run many programs I had to (Office, for instance, ran under emulation, at Pentium-like speeds). I could run SQL Server and pretty much that was it. And notepad. And Minesweeper. I can imagine a niche for high-density ARM-based servers running IIS, but, unless licensing is very cheap, I cannot imagine someone paying for Windows on four ARM blades when the same Windows on one x86 blade could do the same work. When licensing is a big part of the whole stack, the hardware evolves in weird, sometimes unpractical, ways. That happened before too. When the most common Windows version (because it could run lots of popular software), was the 9x series, x86 processors were under specific evolutionary pressures and ended up with deep pipelines and insanely high clocks to remain acceptably fast until past 2000 (and entered an evolutionary dead-end). At the same time, RISC-based boxes that ran Unix routinely had more than one processor since the low 90's. I always thought it interesting that by the time AMD64 was announced, I was retiring our 5-year-old 64-bit mail server.
    - kenjackson 16y ago
      But there is the Cortex A-15 which puts ARM in the Intel perf ballgame. Not surprisingly, I've heard grumblings for nearly the past decade of an ARM version of Windows in various states of stability. It will be interesting to see how far along this is. The issue with x86 and clocks had little do with Windows, and more with the Blue Crystal effect (MHz sell CPUs not perf). There's a great insider book about this called "The Pentium Chronicles" by the chief architect of the P6.
      - rbanffy 16y ago
        And yet, the most popular Windows version couldn't do anything with the dual and quad-processor boxes being sold. Clock number marketing had its share, but the lack of an OS that could run most games or support a lot of the hardware already out (I had a couple gizmos that didn't work under NT) certainly didn't help the evolution of multi-processor x86s. As late as XP-time, most of my friends who were serious about gaming dual booted their boxes between 2000/XP for work and 98 for gaming. For them, a multi-processor workstation would be useless half the time. For most of 1999/2000, I worked on an IBM PC Server 320 with two Pentium 200 processors and found it was wonderfully "smoother" than the 400MHz P2 (or 3, can't remember that) users who didn't run NT had. I cannot picture myself being happy on a single threaded machine anymore.
- sliverstorm 16y ago
  Can an ARM-based Windows desktop function when the only software it runs is Windows? They've done a half-decent enough job with Windows 7 to get people to move from XP, even when app support is patchy. Offer some compatibility, so that people don't rule out switching, but not enough compatibility to allow the software makers to remain complacent... That's the trick. They have a ton of resources, and some half-decent developers, maybe they'll introduce an x86 compatibility layer.
  - rbanffy 16y ago
    > introduce an x86 compatibility layer. On ARM?! ARM is not so fast. I can imagine ARM reaching Atom on single-thread performance, but nothing near Sandy Bridge. That said, DEC had it for the Alpha, but only because the Alpha made the Pentium look like a toy. And it was not fun to run Pentium software at Pentium speeds on what was supposedly a very fast computer.
- gpjt 16y ago
  Now, seriously, Windows failed once on RISC platforms because software vendors were not interested in supporting them. Can an ARM-based Windows desktop function when the only software it runs is Windows? I guess a lot depends on how much developers embrace .NET; .NET apps are compiled to CLR bytecode which presumably could run on ARM devices just as easily as on Intel.
  - rbanffy 16y ago
    > CLR bytecode which presumably could run on ARM devices just as easily as on Intel. It's doubtful if performance would not degrade so much as to make desktop software made to run on the x86 .NET runtime unacceptably slow on ARM.
    - teyc 16y ago
      The most CPU demanding work on a mobile phone is actually the user interface, and on WP7 this is offloaded to hardware. I see no reason why ARM tablets running Windows would be necessarily slower.
      - rbanffy 16y ago
        I can't imagine Windows 8 as a mobile platform.
        teyc 16y ago
        We can all hear the collective groan when Steve Balmer said table PCs will run Windows. I don't question his devotion to Microsoft, but I seriously wished he has a bit more imagination.
  - ot 16y ago
    Windows phone 7 is based on .NET, so they already have an ARM backend for the runtime.
    - rbanffy 16y ago
- harshpotatoes 16y ago
  Be fair now, these hypothetical arm devices can't both be filled with bloat/crapware and not be supported by 3rd party app developers.
  - rbanffy 16y ago
    Good point. So, they probably won't have subsidies. That'll make the Linux versions cheaper.
celoyd 16y ago
If they expect mobile platforms keep growing and to keep not using x86, they can expect both of those by the same token.
yason 16y ago
They've probably seen that: - ARM chiops are soon at desktop speeds; further, there are dual-core and quad-core ARM chips in the near future - Laptops have been fast enough for years that customers can trade off some speed in favor of much longer battery life - They see synergetic advances in gluing together mainline Windows and Windows Phone with ARM platforms: ARM is certainly going to be a player, they're certain that ARM based minilaptops, netbooks, and tablets, when they become closer to mainstream, are going to eat away market share from Windows/x86
- masklinn 16y ago
  > ARM chiops are soon at desktop speeds Frequencies, not speeds.
  - regularfry 16y ago
    That depends what you mean by "speeds." I used an ARM3-based desktop machine for a while 15 years ago. Personally I think it's a meaningless comparison, but there you go.
    - masklinn 16y ago
      > That depends what you mean by "speeds." Same as everybody else, the ratio between an amount of stuff S and the time T it takes to execute a set of operations P on it > I used an ARM3-based desktop machine for a while 15 years ago. So? > Personally I think it's a meaningless comparison, but there you go. It's not so much meaningless as irrelevant. I interpreted "ARM chiops are soon at desktop speeds" to mean "ARM speeds are soon at [processing] speeds corresponding to x86 desktop machines at equivalent prices" which definitely isn't the case, not by a long shot. Soon at desktop frequencies yes (the A15 is advertised at up to 2.5GHz while retail desktop CPUs have been stuck under the 4GHz barrier for more than 5 years), performance per watt definitely (ARM has blown x86 away forever there) but actual, raw computational speed not really.
      - regularfry 16y ago

themrbluesky 16y ago

Uhh. I accidentally searched reddit using this number for other posts about it, and then I refreshed the page and the site is down. Am I being paranoid or did I accidentally break their server?

andre3k1 16y ago
Try Techmeme. Here's the discussion on this topic: http://techme.me/B0l1 http://techme.me/B0l1

jsz0 16y ago

This could be a good opportunity for Microsoft to dump a ton of legacy baggage in Windows 8. Windows developers will ultimately need to support ARM/x86 and the path of least resistance is going to be Microsoft's latest & greatest framework. Great time to draw a line in the sand and reinvent Windows. Microsoft can send the message to developers that if you want your app to run on Windows 8 you need to stop using that Windows 3.1 style font selection dialog box, stop barfing files all over random spots of the file system, stop using crappy early 90's style installers, etc.

kes 16y ago
This might be a stupid question, but that's exactly like the OSX/OS9 switch, right?
- varaon 16y ago
  Yes, and MS already has something similar to Classic mode. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_Virtual_PC#Windows_XP_Mode http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_Virtual_PC#Windows_XP_M...
- wtallis 16y ago
  It would be more like the OS 9 -> OS X switch happening at the same time as the PPC -> Intel transition, but without the old CPU architecture being totally deprecated. Apple's notable for having made 3 major transitions (68k to PPC, MacOS to OS X, and PPC to Intel), but all three of those were as minimal as they could be given the circumstances. The architecture transitions were made with almost completely transparent binary compatibility and minimal changes needed for source code, while the source-incompatible OS/API change was made as gradual as possible with a long grace period (which a few companies chose to exploit rather than update their apps before it was too late). Windows as a system is clearly not clean enough at the moment to easily switch architectures without needing a lot of complex compatibility stuff thrown in. If they try to force developers off old APIs and introduce a new architecture, that new architecture will be a second class citizen and will need a lot of external factors to give it traction.
  - 16y ago

pohl 16y ago

I wonder if this is why Intel unveiled Sandy Bridge a few days early.

6ren 16y ago

The problem Microsoft faces is that the primary selling point of Windows is the third-party software... which won't run on ARM. Solutions: all providers recompile for ARM (unmanageable). W8 emulates x86 (slow). W8 does very tricky JIT recompilation of x86 to ARM, as if it were a VM (amazing). Launching .Net a few years back means that at least all software written for that is trivially retargeted. A clever (or serendipitous?) leveraging of its platform. Apple tackled this problem differently: by banning alternative software platforms from iPhone/iPad, they rapidly created a substantial 3rd party software base of native apps from nothing.

ippisl 16y ago
Moore's law probably gives them enough speed to use x86 for very old software , .net gives them good results for new software .
ippisl 16y ago
Moore's law probably gives them enough speed to use x86 for very old software , .net gives them good results for new software .
erik 16y ago
I believe that DEC (Compaq?) shipped very capable JIT recompilation of x86 to Alpha a long time ago. They were trying to get past the hurdle of Intel's lock in. It didn't work.
- bbgm 16y ago
  And SGI tried something similar on their MIPS processors. That didn't work either
  - wazoox 16y ago
    Actually they shipped some of their workstations with softwindows 95 (which in the meanwhile, became Virtual PC, then was bought by Microsoft). It was close to usable on really fast machines :)
- 16y ago

dstein 16y ago

This feels awfully late given that Windows CE has supported ARM since 1996. I never understood why Microsoft was reluctant to get a full-blown XP running on ARM (minus the x86 & DOS hamstrings). Windows CE always felt like a precursor to something that Microsoft didn't have the vision to follow through with.

rbanffy 16y ago
> I never understood why Microsoft was reluctant to get a full-blown XP running on ARM Because they tried (and failed to gain traction) before with MIPS, PowerPC, Alpha and Itanium.
- razzmataz 16y ago
  NT originally ran on MIPS, before it ever ran on 386.
  - rbanffy 16y ago
    And that's why there never was an Office for MIPS...
    - razzmataz 16y ago
      Actually, the reason for Office never being ported came down to two things: different byte order and lots of x86 assembly mixed in the office code for performance reasons. Office was never 'portable'.

ssp 16y ago

One thing both Google and Apple might be getting wrong is if they won't let developers make serious money. They are both encouraging very low prices like $.99 for "apps", which might mean that a lot of interesting software will never be written for those systems. Microsoft always allowed and encouraged application developers to make money from their Windows applications, even though a "cheap applications means we can sell more Windows" strategy would naively seem to make sense. If I had to pick an OS winner, Android is still the one I would bet on, but with this move, Windows definitely seems to me like a more credible contender. Max Klein wrote about this at one point, but he apparently deleted it. The post is cached here: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:_6hkDvCzHMYJ:maxkle.in/why-im-investing-in-windows-phone-and-skippin/ http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:_6hkDvC...

masklinn 16y ago
> They are both encouraging very low prices like $.99 for "apps" Please do explain how. Apple at least (I don't know about the Marketplace, apart from it not being available to a number of developers) has a wide range of available prices, there are GPS software for far north of $100 apiece, and a number of other applications which definitely aren't $.99. Even in games, "big hits" are generally closer to $10 (when not on sale) than $1 (and outlining this kind of stuff is very much why Apple introduced a third "tops" list in the appstore). And please also explain how Microsoft would solve a race to the bottom which is the combination of users being cheap fucks and developers still wanting those users. > Max Klein wrote about this at one point, but he apparently deleted it. The post is cached here: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:_6hkDvC… http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:_6hkDvC... Doesn't say anything about iOS, and completely handwaves away the problem for Microsoft (apparently, microsoft "cares that he's making money" and will moneyhat him or something). Garbage.