Wednesday, 01 February 2012 21:36

Will Windows 8 for ARM have any impact?

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untitledSo Microsoft is talking up their ARM based version of Windows 8 again. This is the operating system that some think will supplant both Android and iOS. Until a few weeks ago I actually felt the same way, unfortunately unless Microsoft makes some rather drastic changes to their policy I think they are going to miss the boat once again.

As we have told you before, Microsoft only hears about 1/10 of any information that is presented to it. They heard that people wanted a Windows based tablet that was inexpensive and power efficient. They decided to build an OS that would run on ARM processors. Makes sense right? Again it would if that was what the study showed.

The study (which was run in mid-2011) showed that what people really wanted was a tablet experience similar to their desktop. They did not want to have to use a remote connection, or to use some sort of virtual machine (as the XP Mode in Windows 7 has shown); what consumers really wanted was their desktop in tablet form.

Now to the gang at Microsoft that might (on some crazy chance) be reading this it means they want a full version of Windows. Not a stripped down version like Microsoft is planning. Once the announcement went out that there was not going to be an ARM based version of Office (but people would possibly be able to use the online based Office 360) and that most applications would not work on the new Windows 8 for ARM (due to CPU architecture differences) the interest in a Windows tablet dropped overnight.

Still Microsoft has to do something to try and get back into the mobile market. With Windows Phone dying a very slow and painful death that left Tablets as the only option; unfortunately (for Microsoft) they failed to do their homework on the subject and are hard at work trying to force a product that is going to fail to spark consumer interest.

If you need an example of how Microsoft has done this in the past you do not have to look much farther than the move from Windows Mobile 5 to Windows Mobile 6. With one move they remove probably the single most important feature of the Windows Mobile platform. They took away the ability to create and edit office based documents and turned the function into a view only nightmare. I know several people that switched from Windows Mobile to Palm (and in some cases iPhone) right after that happened.

While we do hope that Microsoft makes some serious changes to their new OS (both the mobile and desktop versions) we have a feeling that this will be another Windows Vista; an operating system that forces things that the consumers do not understand or even want and we all know what happened to Vista…

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Read 1898 times Last modified on Wednesday, 01 February 2012 21:44

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