Displaying items by tag: Windows RT

Someone has made a rather bold prediction about Windows Phone. According to the International Data Corp Windows Phone will grab some 14% market share between now and 2016 to become the second most used Mobile Operating system. Now it might interest you to know that this bit of insight also predicts that Android will hit its peak of market share this year and slowly decline. It will maintain the number one spot, but with only about 53%.

The secret is out; Microsoft wants to own your whole home with their devices at the center of your connected living space. Of course, this is nothing new. I can remember talking with Microsoft about the “digital home” in 2007 and before. At the time they were looking to build the blocks needed to create an entire (and viable) ecosystem for the home and the enterprise. Of course back then most of Microsoft was still trying to find ways to keeps users data in their own hands. This is something that has changed (because it is not a money maker), but the original concept has remained the same.

At CES 2010 we watched as the “PC” world began to gear up for its onslaught into the tablet market. Many at the time were still claiming that Apple was going to hold the market simply because they had a very big foot hold (and still do). However as we watched press briefings from Asus, Lenovo, nVidia, AMD, and Intel we saw something very interesting; the move to tablets that make sense for everyone. We are not talking about the choice of OS here either.

Not that long ago (when Microsoft was still hammer out the details of their Office 15 offering) there was a small stir on the internet about the possibility of Office for the iPad and for Android based tablets. At the time Microsoft completely denied the rumors and stated that they were not working on working on office for iPad and that the pictures floating around were faked.

This just in from the Microsoft is being foolish again desk. We have told you that Microsoft is seriously pushing their vision of the PC again. They have dropped all pretenses that the PC is all about you and are now rushing headlong down the tunnel with the thought of monetizing your PC usage with the cloud. To do this they are shoving their new UI Metro down your throat whether you like it or not. There have been some that like Metro calling it sleek and slick. However, while Metro is manageable it is also very dull and lacks any kind of elegance or class. It looks like a kid designed it and like XP brings images of Fischer Price to mind instead of a high-performance operating system.

It looks like we might have done our Windows 8 coverage the wrong way around as we are now seeing a host of articles that are showing off the new look of the desktop, the Metro UI News, Sports and Weather apps and more. This is very odd as we have been talking about much this since the Build Conference. Still it is very possible that some of these sites are now listing these items in a new PR push for Microsoft. After all the most recent one we saw on the new Desktop Look had a direct quote from them on Aero and the “vista” look.

After reporting on the potential for Congressional involvement in the “issue” over Windows RT we are hearing that Mozilla is trying to drag this into a new area simply because the new software will have the name “Windows” in it. You see Mozilla’s argument revolves around Microsoft’s promises to make “Windows” more open to other developers. When asked how Microsoft’s new way of handling Windows RT differs from what both Google and Apple are doing they claimed that by not allowing access to certain Win32 APIs that Microsoft has ported to WindowsRT (the actually only exist in the desktop mode) they are locking out competition.

You would think today was a slow news day as we see people reporting on something we talked about almost a month ago (well really more than that). It seems that people are waking up from the haze of all of the news about Windows on ARM (Windows RT) and starting to realize that x86/64 tablets are going to be much, much more attractive to both consumers, businesses and both manufacturers and developers.

So Mozilla complains about Microsoft and suddenly Congress wants to take a look at Microsoft’s plans for Windows on ARM. Now we are not really surprised that Mozilla is complaining (after all that is what they do), but we are shocked that they are not complaining about Google and Apple at the same time.While we are not all that happy with the direction that Microsoft is going with Windows 8 and Windows RT they are not doing anything that has not been done by both Apple and Google on the same platform; the tablet.

When Microsoft first announced that only Microsoft based products would have access to the “desktop” mode in Windows on ARM (Windows RT) we began to wonder just how long it would take for Mozilla, Google, Opera and others to chime in about how wrong this is. We now have heard from Mozilla who seems to feel that this lock out from the desktop is nothing more than Microsoft being unfair to the competition and, according to Mozilla, is in violate of the promises Microsoft made to both the EU and the US DoJ.