> Now everybody who develops for desktop windows also kinda develops for mobile windows and strenghtens the weak windows mobile ecosystem... I don't see this h

> Now everybody who develops for desktop windows also kinda develops for mobile windows and strenghtens the weak windows mobile ecosystem... I don't see this happening. You're talking about the intersection of Windows apps and their corresponding developers which: a) Haven't already migrated to the web. Discounting Microsoft's own products, the revenues for web "applications" have to dwarf desktop commercial software by several orders of magnitude. Remember when Encarta was a viable product? Or a recipe database? Mapping? Finance? You name something "ordinary people" used to do with boxed software and it's almost all being done online. b) Are suitable for a Metro/Touch-style interface and can leverage it to be cross-device easily (Games are out, so likely are IDEs, pro tools like Photoshop...). Whole classes of applications are going to keep being written against the non-Metro Win32 APIs and under the assumption that you've got a 12"+ screen and a keyboard/mouse. c) Are popular enough to go through the bother of a rewrite (and presumably popular enough to make a difference to Windows Phone or the Surface). Much of what's left when you exclude a) and b) is vertical market stuff or internally written line-of-business applications that will never be worth a radical WinRT rewrite. That's not to say Metro and Windows Phone won't be successful. I just think they're not going to be successful because the folks still writing desktop Windows software will wake up one morning and realize, "Oops, I guess I wrote a Windows Phone application, might as well ship that, too!"