So Sinofsky has finally let us all in on the big secret of how (much of) Windows 8 is going to work on ARM: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/b8/archive/...ndows-for-the-arm-processor-architecture.aspx Since his post has approximately 5 trillion words, here are Tim Anderson, Mary Branscombe, and Ina Fried with the important points: http://www.itwriting.com/blog/5433-...ft-can-write-desktop-apps-but-you-cannot.html http://www.techradar.com/news/softw...ndows-8-on-arm-steven-sinofsky-speaks-1062176 http://allthingsd.com/20120209/wind...n-of-office-to-arrive-with-rest-of-windows-8/ * The new Metro UI with its new underlying WinRT API is available on both ARM and Intel and accessible to all developers, but only through the Microsoft-controlled app store. * The traditional desktop mode based on the old Win32 API does exist on ARM, but only Microsoft can deploy applications for it. All other developers are limited to the Metro/WinRT sandbox and its app store. * Sinofsky emphasizes that Windows on ARM "will not support any type of virtualization or emulation approach, and will not enable existing x86/64 applications to be ported or run" (i.e. by third-party developers who are not Microsoft). He says limited resources and lack of mouse & keyboard on mobile would render such emulation pointless. * Microsoft will have the Office suite available for Windows 8 on ARM, and those applications will use desktop mode. So will a few built-in OS utilities such as Task Manager. * Internet Explorer 10 for Windows 8 will not support plug-ins on ARM, not even in desktop mode. (Ina Fried says Sinofsky confirmed this.) Not unexpected since Adobe is dropping the mobile Flash plug-in anyway, but I expect this also means no Silverlight on ARM -- after all, that would be a third-party loophole and a potential resource hog / bad user experience on mobile which Sinfofsky doesn't want. * Windows 8 ARM devices will use the iPhone model: they only run preinstalled Windows 8, and Windows 8 for ARM only comes preinstalled on such devices. Short of hackery there's no way to put another OS on a Windows 8 ARM device, or Windows 8 ARM on another device. (Mary Branscombe says Sinofsky confirmed this.)
The only surprising thing about this is that Microsoft iOSed Windows before Apple iOSed MACOSX. I spit in their general direction.
Fail that it's there. Microsoft will get so much pressure from other legacy companies who don't want to redo their old shit that they'll back off this and allow deployment of these applications, resulting in a Jekyl and Hyde experience.
I don't know about that, they would have to recompile those applications anyway (assuming they aren't .NET) and remove any dependencies on x86 hardware, including indirect ones through libraries and drivers. The older those legacy apps, the more likely their companies wouldn't get them to work anyway. As for .NET applications, the Silverlight people will certainly raise a stink (again) but Metro has a not-too-painful porting path for .NET code, so that's where Microsoft will point them.
The difference is that you can't run an iOS app on MACOSX; you can run a WOA app on Win8/x86. Their clear goal is to move the traditional desktop into legacy support mode, something that businesses run but people don't, and get everyone moved over to Metro and the Store, whether on ARM or x86.
I agree, that seems like the obvious long-term goal for this dual-mode architecture. Desktop mode will live on, but eventually only in special Windows versions for developers and corporations. edit: And you know who is going to absolutely hate this future? Valve and the other game download stores. Their business model is simply going to evaporate once desktop mode is similarly restricted (or eliminated) on x86 consumer editions of Windows, since everyone will have to use the Microsoft store -- just like on the 360.
You can run them without recompiling? Or do you mean that the same libs are present on both so you can just compile to both architectures without (much) modification?
As far as I know, all apps written to Metro run cross-architecture without any special work, but I haven't paid close attention to the mechanism for that.
Metro allows using C++ so you can have architecture-dependent machine code. Sinofsky specifically mentioned that you can upload multiple architecture-specific versions of your application to the store, and users see the correct one based on their device. Apps written purely in .NET IL or JavaScript should run on any platform, of course.
I think the "iOSification" of the desktop is a long, long way off. I like the iPhone and iPad models -- focused devices and applications that cover the general use cases for mobile and "curl on the couch" computing. Great. However, I'm a software engineer working with a bunch of other mechanical and electrical and optical engineers. There are so many niche applications out there in so many industries that run on Windows that there's no chance that Microsoft will ever dump the desktop on x86 machines.
Not on Windows version for industrial use, no. But assuming the Metro Store takes off, Microsoft can very well remove or lock down the desktop on consumer versions of Windows. How many Windows home users right now only use Microsoft Office and a web browser anyway?
Yeah, I think it's a transition process, like when Apple supported legacy MacOS Classic apps in MACOSX, and then eventually pulled that mode out -- I think Microsoft will leave the classic mode in essentially forever for business users, but that their (reasonable) expectation is that home users will eventually drift into not using the classic desktop at all. The thing that's interesting, though, is that their strategy really relies on Metro being very popular on x86 machines. Because right now, if you were going to buy an ARM tablet, you'd buy iOS or Android, not Win8, just because of the apps and ecosystem that's out there. Which means nobody's going to write too many Metro apps for that audience. So if Win8 x86 users end up using Metro and Metro apps, then there's a reason to develop them (since Win8 x86 will be popular), and then you can get enough of them out there to make Win8 on ARM a viable option. But if Win8 x86 users turn out to be conservative fogies who shun the Microsoft Store and Metro and run basically the same apps they always ran on Win7, well, then things turn out differently.
I think this is a very different sort of shift than the 68000 to PowerPC to Intel shifts or MacOS Classic to MacOS X shift. Those were all "here's a way to run old applications for a year or so while people port the application, and then we drop the backcompat". They weren't fundamentally changing the type of apps that were being run. I'm going to think about how a Windows 8 "lockdown" edition would apply to my parents and my wife's parents. My dad recently had to run out and buy a laptop because he was heading overseas in 2 days, and he had to run some specialized applications which would not be Metro-style apps. He went to Best Buy, bought a laptop, and went, installing what he needed, How would this work in the Windows8 future? Would Best Buy split their offerings and sell both "Home" and "Business" versions of machines (and charge a premium for the "Business" machines)? Would Microsoft allow you (for more money) to "unlock" Windows to a Business edition? Will I be able to download alternate web browsers for Win8 Metro? Firefox? Chrome? Safari (hahahahaha)? No? Wasn't there a lawsuit about this very thing some years back? Can I see Microsoft encouraging people to stay in the safe Metro environment for Office and web browsing? Sure! Will that do it for a large portion of the population? Yes, and probably better than is being done now. However, the amount of people that will need the desktop for some reason or another is a high enough percentage that Microsoft will not be able to remove the desktop from consumer versions of Windows8. (But they will add lots of warning dialogs!) It's not that it's a bad idea, it's just that there's so much software out there assuming an "unlocked" Windows -- something which was never present on the phone/tablet market (because it's new). I don't think Apple will get away with it 100% on MacOS either, for the same reason. What, you want to take away the command line for developers of iOS software? Good luck with that.
I find the whole ARM thing to be immensely ironic. Microsoft and Intel helped to kill Apple with Windows and complex-instruction(CISC or x86) processors (ARM and PowerPC are both reduced-instruction, or RISC). Now, with the tablet/smartphone revolution (and pretty much no place for power-hungry CISC) RISC is looking to be on the rise. I consider iOS to be Steve Jobs' parting shot at MS, one that may finally break the back of the whole PC market. Even Linus Torvalds has to be laughing at the fact that it took a multibillion dollar company (Google) to finally find a market for Linux (outside of servers) and that market is almost exclusively ARM (a place where open source culture fits in with the wild variations of ARM). So it doesn't surprise me one bit that Windows will run under ARM. I have heard, however, that there will be no native interoperability between the ARM and Intel versions (read: buy 2 copies of Office plzthx) Gizmodo has a pretty good rundown on the differences between the two.
Which is why Android, with its support of non-Google sources, is the only ARM OS that I think is worth considering. An angle on the WOA Office thing that just occurred to me: Holy fuck is this anti-competitive against other office suites. If LibreOffice wants to run on Win8, it must be programmed against WinRT, which is obviously a huge undertaking. But Microsoft allows MS Office to use special, non-WinRT, APIs that aren't available to any other software so that they can get Office out there without having to rewrite it. And then, just as a kicker, they bundle it in with Windows. I know that MS Office dominates that market anyway, and plus nobody really cares about office apps, but really, if Microsoft had tried something like this in the '90s -- making special APIs available only to itself, and then bundling its product with Windows -- the DOJ would have been all over them. I guess it's a different world now. Heck, it's probably even legit for Microsoft to just reject OpenOffice from the app store because it "duplicates existing functionality."
To be honest, I'm not totally convinced Android can survive in this New World Order. What competitive advantage do they have over Win8? 2 years of software ecosystem growth and a big install base. But Android doesn't really lock their users in very well. I think Windows 8 might be more like the Xbox than WP7. As Chris said above, it seems obvious the long term goal is to have this Metro UI be the only UI for desktop users too. And if the mass market moves to ARM on Windows, the death of the developer community around win32 amounts to the same thing as a closed marketplace anyway.
I can't tell if this is anti-Windows snark, or if you aren't aware that this is the plan for Windows 8 (not just on ARM, all Metro apps).
Fixed, because WOA is Metro-only for everyone who isn't Microsoft. Correct, and of course all non-IE browsers also have to be rewritten for WinRT before they can run on WOA. I'm sure someone will try to sue Microsoft over this but I'm not so sure they have a case: Microsoft can point out that its market share on mobile devices is still tiny, that locking down Win32 also means that Windows dominance on Intel will not automatically translate, and that worse practices are already accepted in the case of Apple, with its much bigger market share on mobile devices.
Of course not, they are different processor architectures and require different binaries. Sinofsky has also emphasized that WOA won't feature Intel emulation, so stuff has to be recompiled at least. Perhaps Microsoft will offer some kind of "family pack" that includes multiple Office licenses in both ARM and Intel versions, though. Then again, maybe they'll just bundle Office with every WOA tablet anyway. edit: Also, legally you're supposed to acquire a separate license of Office for each separate system anyway. Activation will check that you do. You're not allowed to put a single copy of Office on multiple systems even now.
Are you making some point about AMD or do you just think their market share is small enough that x86* === Intel?
Neither, I didn't actually think of Intel as manufacturers at all, only of the chip architecture. Change that to "Intel and AMD" if you like, or "x86/x64".
The ARM processors are the same locked, walled garden as iPads. They aren't general purpose computing devices, and I'll be dumbfounded if even a tiny percentage of people run office on them. That's why I don't care.
I'm pretty sure that in the near future, your definition of "general purpose computing devices" will exclude most of the general purpose computing devices that people actually use. For my part I'll be dumbfounded if ten years from now, any large number of non-professionals will still bother with a non-tablet just to run Office. Creating the occasional letter or spreadsheet should work just fine on a WOA tablet.
I don't think real keyboards are going to vanish any time soon. Chromebooks are the future, not iPads.
Keyboards are not tied to processor architecture. The Transformer Prime is an Android ARM device with a keyboard. Win8 obviously supports keyboards, and it wouldn't be a stretch to imagine that Win8 ARM devices with keyboards will exist, too. The "Chromebook" of 2013 might well be a laptop with a touchscreen, running Android or Win8.
I'm pretty sure Sinofsky said that explicitly, that Office is part of WOA (whether it be tablets or laptops, I suppose).
Er, yes? I was responding to your expectations regarding popularity, I don't know what you're talking about here... No, Mozilla Firefox has its own Gecko engine. And the two Webkit-based browsers (Chrome & Safari) each need to port their different frontends to WinRT, too. Assuming Apple bothers re-porting Safari, of course, which they probably won't.
Microsoft expects most Win8 laptops to have touchscreens, whether or not they also have keyboards. They could be wrong. But either way, processor architecture is a separate variable. You can have ARM laptops and Intel tablets.
Intel tablets already exist, actually. In fact, once Win8 launches, the first wave of Win8 tablets will be Intel, not ARM. Win8-ARM isn't slated (hah) for release until 2013, whereas Win8-x86 will be out by the end of this year.
Windows 8 UI on portable computing devices with touchscreen makes sense. Windows 8 UI on a traditional PC makes no fucking sense whatsoever. Unless they plan to replace keyboard with a large touchscreen pad.
The awesome thing about that logo is that most people's response seems to be "Oh wow, the Windows logo was supposed to be a WINDOW."
