Outside of Office 15 the contact lists, calendar and photo sharing all other applications will be Metro only and have to come from the Windows Store. This move is intended to help maintain the quality of applications and prevent malware… Ok really it is all about preventing pirated applications and making sure that Microsoft is not cut out of the money chain.

Still the fact that Microsoft is allowing a real version of Office to be run on Windows 8 for ARM is a good thing. There was a growing number of people that were beginning to doubt that Microsoft would do this (after a couple of comments on the Building Windows 8 Blog). Part of the excitement surrounding an ARM based Windows tablet or mobile device is that there is going to be very little (if any) problems with platform compatibility. Having owned both an iPad and an Android tablet I can tell you that there are sometimes conversion issues when using the productivity applications on these platforms.

We hope that Microsoft really reconsiders the “Windows Store” only policy before the launch. After all if they do not open up the platform, someone will come a long with a way to “jailbreak” it and people will load what they want anyway. The least they can do is open it up enough so that people can use the tablets in the manner they want to without the need to break open the OS and file system.

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