Friday, March 16, 2012

Tablet computers: Difference engine: The empire strikes back | The Economist

“Ingenious,” as forced marches go – from an Economist Windows 8 tablet perspective

Could a similar fate be in store for Microsoft’s latest ARM affair? To have any chance of succeeding with a Windows tablet, Microsoft has to persuade its huge army of third-party developers to create applications for WOA. Under normal circumstances, few would bother.
Microsoft’s answer is ingenious. The company has designed WOA so that not only is it unable to run existing Windows programs, but it also cannot use a software emulator as a fudge for doing so. The only applications that will run on the ARM flavour of Windows 8 are programs written specifically to work with the new Metro interface that WOA shares with the desktop version of Windows 8. Any software developer wishing to write an application for the desktop version will therefore automatically produce code for an ARM version as well.

Tablet computers: Difference engine: The empire strikes back | The Economist

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