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> When the first Windows RT came out, there was no compatibility, and this wasn't communicated well. It was worse than this. Source compatibility with the Win3

> When the first Windows RT came out, there was no compatibility, and this wasn't communicated well. It was worse than this. Source compatibility with the Win32 APIs you would use for ~20 years to target x86/amd64 was explicitly a non goal. To target ARM you needed to use their new, half-baked frameworks designed for the Windows 8 tablets. You couldn't recompile a desktop app, even if it would have worked fine had they given you the headers and libs to do it. Even internally, even among decision makers, people were very confused about this.

nikanj 1y ago
They believed the ARM transition would be an excellent opportunity to lose support for the old. Remember the Barney Stinson model: New is always better
a2128 1y ago
They also wanted to force people to get everything from Windows Store. This deeply spooked Valve at the time who saw this as potentially the end of Steam, and it's a big part of the reason why they started working on making Linux gaming viable. So overall RT was an incredible failure and Microsoft is still feeling its effects today