Yet on mobile, we go out of our ways to make things look and feel native, even if the web's being used. The concept of run anywhere, from a code execution stan

Yet on mobile, we go out of our ways to make things look and feel native, even if the web's being used. The concept of run anywhere, from a code execution standpoint, is fine. That doesn't preclude using platform specific APIs to make the application better. Like using C# but targeting iOS's UI toolkits. Or using signals from a Mono application. While MS may have certainly intended to fragment Java, the core concept of platform specific APIs isn't inherently a bad thing. Also note that during this time, MS supported Windows on non-Intel architectures so I'm not sure about the x86 comment.