Whether we’re living in a post-PC world, as many think today when they look at growth rates and profits, or it’s PC-Plus, For Ever, as Microsoft’s very literate chief ideologue staunchly maintains, it doesn’t really matter. When the Redmond giant comes up with a new version of Windows, it’s a Big Festive Deal that will impact the lives of hundreds of millions of PC users, and twist the fates of PC makers and application developers.
This year’s festive occasion was the Build conference held last week in Anaheim, California, where Microsoft revealed “Windows reimagined”, a.k.a. Windows 8. If you have the time and inclination, you can watch the keynote sessions and download the Developer Preview, which I did. (See Lifehacker for tips on how to install Windows 8 on a virtual machine. They worked for this accident-prone user.)
For this long-time Windows user, two things stick out:
- The innovative Metro UI and its “have your cake and eat it” coexistence with the more traditional Windows look.
- More important, the forking of apps on the ARM version of Win 8.
The Metro UI, a close relative of the elegant and justly-praised Windows Phone 7 UI, welcomes you when you log in:
The idea is to present a “touch ready”, customizable set of tiles that address our favorite everyday activities. The Metro UI is a step along the “Windows Everywhere” road that leads to a single, elegant UI for all Microsoft-powered devices, whether they’re PCs, smartphones, or tablets. (I know…Microsoft isn’t keen on using the “T” word. As Frank Shaw tells us, they’re “companion devices” that surround the center stage PC.)
Touch the Desktop tile and…
…the familiar Windows UI is back…but this time with a Ribbon, the same feature that was introduced with Office 2007 and that figured more prominently — some say intrusively — in Office 2010 applications.
You might see this mix of new and old as a lack of coherence, a clash of UI models.
Personally, I perceive it as keeping with Microsoft’s traditional incremental approach: Never break with the past, introduce new features while keeping a strong link with what users and developers already know.
Still, one wonders whether paying customers, as opposed to company officials, will be impressed by the device-agnostic first look, or confused by the underlying UI differences.
Let’s turn to the ARM version of Windows 8, one that will run on real tablets, feather light devices that have a long-lasting battery and a virtual keyboard. It’s no surprise that existing Windows applications, written for Intel’s x86 chips, won’t work. What is surprising is that Microsoft has no plan to adapt, to recompile those apps for the new processor. Let’s let Steven Sinofsky, Windows Division President, explain:
Microsoft’s concern is that x86 apps aren’t designed with power frugality in mind, something ARM tablets and notebooks are likely to at least partially prioritize. Security is also a concern: “if we do let them run, we just brought the perceived negatives of some of the ecosystem” he explains, “so, people say, great, now it’s easy to port viruses and malware and we’ll port those.”
This forking, this split of Windows devices into two incompatible strains isn’t the Microsoft way. For the first time in Microsoft’s history, the users of Windows-powered hardware will have to ask: ‘Will this application work on that device?’ You can run Office 2010 if there’s Intel inside, but not on its ARM sibling
Why?
Microsoft lost its position in the smartphone world and has placed a heavy bet on Nokia in an effort to regain its place. Now Ballmer & Co. watch as tablets grow even faster than smartphones, and the ARM architecture enjoys close to 100% market share in both of these categories. So Microsoft must go ARM. But, as Sinovsky explains, because x86 apps aren’t designed with power consumption in mind, Microsoft has no choice but to go for a new generation of power-optimized ARM-based applications.
For Microsoft, it’s either take both forks in the road–develop two independent applications branches–or leave the market to ‘i’-terlopers. And Intel be damned for not delivering the low-powered processors they keep promising year after year.
(Intel’s response at the Intel Developer Forum, also held last week: “Intel and Google [will] optimize future releases of the Android™ platform for Intel’s family of low power Intel® Atom™ processors.” Microsoft be damned. Company execs also promised that next year’s Haswell chip will yield laptops that boast a 24 hours battery capacity.)
Of course, the forking might only be temporary. Microsoft could be making a bold, smart move: Force developers to write new “Metro style” applications, that, when recompiled, will run on ARM and x86 tabl…err…“companion devices.” If Intel really delivers the “24 hour battery life” microprocessor, they can move back to one hardware family. The ARM bet will have been a brief affair, a hedge and a stick. (Aging geeks will remember Microsoft breaking its Wintel vows, having brief flings dead-end with Alpha and PowerPC chips, respectively from DEC and Moto-IBM.)
Again, it’s not the usual Microsoft way. The company typically moves forward with great care, introducing new features only if backwards compatibility could be preserved. The results have been spectacularly good but, over time, the weight of legacy layers in the operating system and application software has become the kind of liability Sinovsky referred to. With Windows 8, Microsoft breaks with the past and picks an alternative to Intel.
In the meantime, customers, particularly those in Big Enterprise, will be asking a lot of questions: Why upgrade, which hardware, which applications are available on what
It’ll be interesting to see how Microsoft navigates these straits with more than the empty rhetoric that did nothing for the company against the rise of smartphone and tablets.
We’re told Windows 8 will ship in about a year. A long, long time in this exploding market.
PS: On a related note, Horace Dediu just penned yet another sharp Asymco post: OS turning circles: Questioning Windows’ maneuverability.
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28 Comments
I think this will be a marketing nightmare for Microsoft, not only to big business, but also to consumers who will be very surprised when their Windows device doesn’t run Office or IE with Flash. So because they insist on a single Windows 8 product (as opposed to positioning Metro as a standalone platform) the message will have to be about chip architectures now, this will not be sexy at all. Two UIs, two IEs, two architectures, some apps run, some don’t, this is going to be messy.
Microsoft: It thirsts for death.
Why’s it called Windows when it doesn’t use any, well, windows?!?
I just wonder on the real reasons on why they chose to break the backward compatibility with the old x86 apps.
Couldn’t they do what Apple did with its transition to Intel processors using Rosetta? Maybe they just want to clean up the platform of old legacy stuffs, to make it smaller and faster.
And, by the way, I believe that applications using the .NET runtime should work as they are without the need to be recompiled, unless they need to use the new Metro UI.
Easing consumers into a touch-centric version of the OS for slates and phones, while maintaining a keyboard/mouse version that supports the vast legacy application ecosystem seems a perfectly rational way to support a billion customers, many of whom are in the enterprise. Alas, a problem Apple never had to grapple with (the billion or the enterprise).
FYI, the next version of Office (Office 15) has already been demoed running on an ARM platform. It was the regular version of Office too, not a Metro app.
http://news.softpedia.com/news/Metro-UI-Elements-for-Office-15-Outlook-195544.shtml
Windows 8 business model: you can have our cake and we’ll eat it too. Will be interesting to see how that pans out.
@jsk Because Steve Ballmer only respects products with Windows in the name.
Has anyone ever seen Steve Ballmer and Homer Simpson at the same Devolopers Conference? Just askin’?
Not only Microsoft’s margin has to go down from $50/seat
to may be half for tablet and even less for phones.
Microsoft charging 30% for AppStore is also not going to make then any profit.
Even the UltraBooks will require lower prices in order to compete with Apple.
Interesting thing with current iPad adoption by Enterprise
is mainly web based or VirtualPC based both not requiring Windows
backward compatibility.
real reason Intel and Microsoft cant be married anymore is margin
pressure, both can’t get 60%+ margin on chip or OS or software.
Even if Microsoft and Intel can produce a competitive product, they can’t
charge premium price. Once market punishes them for that then
they will go at speed of light, right now it is just stemming the ipad tide.
I agree that they should change the name from window to for example the French name “Taquin” of the Fifteen puzzle (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fifteen_puzzle).
On their blog they are strong on virtualization.
The forking issue may work with IT managers who love choice and the ability to run whatever they want, however they want. Yes, it’s a little confusing, but they patience, budget and enough recurring meetings to figure it all out.
But for consumers, more choice could lead to analysis paralysis. Consumers are flocking to Apple devices because they simple to understand and Apple makes it easy to select the right device. Walk into an Apple store and your choices are limited compared to what you find at Best Buy where half the machines are broken and the other half are turned off or stuck on a BSOD.
But the few choices Apple provides look great, run smooth, and actually work in the store. That’s a big deal!
Microsoft knows their bread is buttered by IT departments and large corporate buyers. Even the shitty Vista sold in the hundreds of millions. The real question is whether Window 8 will succeed on tablets. Only time will tell, but I’m predicting it will not do much better against the iPad 3 than Windows Phone 7 has done against the iPhone.
I think think the end of the article hit the nail on the head. There’s still a few missing pieces that it’s not hitting on:
1. Windows 8 on ARM will be Metro only, there will be no “classic” desktop mode
2. Windows 8 Metro Apps all have to be obtained via Microsofts new App store where they control which Apps are given access
It’s perfectly possible (and very likely) that Microsoft will simply make it so any Metro application approved for the App store must be compiled for both ARM and x86. If that’s the case there will be no customer complaints on the application compatibility front, but they will essentially be segregating Windows into 3 classes of portablecomputers: Tablets (ARM chips, Metro only), Convertibles (x86, Meant to use both Metro and Classic), Traditional Laptops (x86 Primarily used in Classic Desktop mode). The division between the ARM tablets and the x86 Convertibles must be handled carefully or MS will end up with angry customers that didn’t get the computer that they expect.
In the long run, assuming x86 improves at the rate Intel is suggesting, We could eliminate any need for an ARM version of Windows within a few years. Thus this Windows “fork” would have little to no discernible effects on consumers.
No need to overthink this. If performance and battery life are good, users will be happy with Windows 8. Novices won’t venture outside of Win8 App store, and power users get to keep their precious desktop UI. I’ve been using Windows 8 Developer Preview and it’s faster than Windows 7.
You forgot one thing. Microsoft probably wants to move away from native apps all together. They’ve said htlm5 is the way to make metro apps and .NET is still very big on windows and will probably become even bigger. Both of these will run on either platform.
What’s becoming clear is that Windows 8 is almost exactly the same as Apple’s strategy, but named in a confusing way. Not the opposite as many people thought at first.
Your Microsoft iPad will still have a mobile interface and mobile-optimized native apps installed only from a single, secure installer. It will still have open standard W3C HTML5 apps installed from anywhere. It will still have ISO MPEG4 audio video. It will still hide the file system from the user unless they want to install an app that provides that for them. All the stuff that Paul Thurrott has been complaining makes iPad suck.
The major difference is that Microsoft is going to have one Metro platform for apps, while Apple has the equivalent iOS but is also maintaining an additional power user platform on the Mac. This makes sense, though, if you look at PC pricing. Microsoft has $500 customers, while Apple has both $500 customers and an additional group of $1000 customers for the pro app platform.
> FYI, the next version of Office (Office 15) has already
> been demoed running on an ARM platform. It was the
> regular version of Office too, not a Metro app.
That is where the confusion started. That demo is being understood now as an epic blunder. They are not going to ship that. They never planned to ship that.
They have since explained that the purpose of that demo was to show that it was “the real Windows” they were porting to ARM, not “Windows Embedded” or some other thing that they have also named Windows. It was not actually running on a tablet, but rather on a disembodied mock-up that had many gigabytes more memory and storage than a tablet, and did not have to get 10 hours of battery life like a tablet. They may even have been running the ARM SoC at a much higher speed because they could put cooling on there if they liked, it was not built into a mobile device. The hardware they were running on would have cost much more than an iPad. You have to put in an extra 8 gigabytes of storage just to give the user the same free storage as iPad, because Windows 8 is 8 gigabytes bigger than iOS. You have to put in 4 times or 8 times the RAM as an iPad just to give the user the ability to launch an app. A small RAM allotment is a big part of why iPad is so cheap. You have to deal with the fact that Windows apps are made for a single 1-pixel thick mouse pointer, not 10 fat fingers that mash 60 square pixels at a time, and the way you deal with that is to build a user interface framework like iOS or Metro and get developers to port their apps to it.
So they are not planning to ship that a legacy Windows experience on ARM. That is just another kind of unicorn tablet.
Might, should, Apple do something similar with Mac OS X? Namely, create a distinct application environment (perhaps a streamlined 64 bit Cocoa) for the future and leave old stuff behind? And by old stuff I mean, among other things, 32 bit apps (both Carbon and Cocoa).
There is likely some price to pay, at least in consumers minds, for Microsoft being seen to adopt various Apple approaches (personally, I think they are doing the right thing). The AppStore model (down to the 30% cut), for example, may give Microsoft the aura of a follower rather than a leader. This builds on the Dunkirk-like retreat of WinMo followed by the difficult birth of Windows Phone 7 and the efforts to create Windows Stores. Clearly each company can and does leapfrog the other at various times and Apple has been on a roll, but it is legitimate to ask whether Microsoft will be seen to have lost its mojo in the minds of the public by conceding to at least some of Apple’s various innovations.
Jean-Louis Gassée: do you see any similarity between Microsoft saying that PCs will never die (because their revenue stream is tied to the PC and not the new tablets Apple is dominating) and your old boss John Sculley pronouncing “Apple II Forever” (because the old Apple’s revenues were tied to that system rather than the Mac that it couldn’t immediately find a market for)?
Also, you write “For the first time in Microsoft’s history, the users of Windows-powered hardware will have to ask: ‘Will this application work on that device?’ You can run Office 2010 if there’s Intel inside, but not on its ARM sibling.”
That’s not really true. In the late 90s Microsoft delivered Windows NT on various platforms (including x86, PowerPC, MIPS). Windows users (primarily enterprise, the only ones to use NT) had to choose, and the choice was rough and problematic. After dropping the promise multiple platform support of NT in Windows 2000, Microsoft then began supporting Intel’s Itanium IA-64 in addition to x86. That too was a mess. And when it switched its 64-bit platform focus to AMD’s x64, it again left a mess for users to determine if they had 64-bit apps, plugins and the 64-bit version of Windows, which initially couldn’t even run 32-bit apps.
Apple originally decided not to move to Intel in the 80s because, although it could port the Mac OS, it would have abandoned developers on 68k, forcing them to rewrite their apps. When it did port to PowerPC, it made great pains to support backward compatibility for users and developers. It did the same thing when it moved to Intel, and again in moving to x64 Intel chips.
In the move to tablets, Apple had already developed an ARM port of OS X, highly customized for portable uses in iOS. It made no suggestion that Intel apps might run or might work well recompiled for ARM and slogged on a mobile device. Microsoft has announced a very sloppy, unplanned trip to ARM. Most customers think it will “somehow” get existing Windows apps working on iPad-like hardware. They are wrong, as you indicate.
But the parallel suggestion, that Microsoft will also release Office for Metro and that it will be good, is also a farce. This is the company that couldn’t’ release a decent version of Office for Mac across the last decade, despite an installed base of 30-50 million Mac users. It announced it would port a few Office connectivity apps (not the full suite at all) to Symbian and just now got that out, two years later.
The Office unit within Microsoft has aways spurned the own company’s Tablet PC plans, and that was running Intel and the full Windows. Now they’re going to copy Apple’s iOS iWork apps three years late within 12 months of “not saying” they they “might have a plan in place” about bringing Office apps to an OS that isn’t going to be done for at least another year?
Best case for Windows Enthusiasts is to expect to run “Office 360″ web apps on the Windows 8 tablet, but you could already do that from an iPad. So where’s the value proposition? Apple now has iWork with iCloud support, at least a year ahead of Microsoft selling its first Windows 8 license.
Windows 8 (32 bit, 64 bit, 64 bit w/ Dev tools) ran fine in VirtualBox for me, but then I run then on a 64 bit, 4GB, Windows 7 machine. No slowness for me. Perhaps it is the fact that the ones who wrote the article and claimed slowness are running on a Mac.
When Windows 95 came out, a number of DOS programs, mostly games, did not run in the DOS window. Those apps had taken shortcuts and circumvented development standards MS had published. When VB.NET came out, some VB6 developers complained. They were still doing procedural programmign in VB6, instead of object-oriented (OO) VB6 programming, and ignoring the standards MS put in place for OO VB6 programming, their VB6 code would not port to VB.NET.
In those cases, MS was made the “boogeyman” for developers’ own shortcomings and arrogance. Some of that will be true as the shift to Windows 8 takes place. Well-written .NET apps will run on Windows 8, but again, developer shortcomings and arrogance will lead them to blame MS for their own doing.
However, if MS pushes the Metro UI on the desktop as the default, then they will justify valid complaints about the uselessness of that UI design on desktops/laptops/netbooks, which will lead to acceptance of the invalid ciriticisms.
If MS waits until months from now to deliver a definitive statement on whether legacy VB6 code will run on x86 Windows 8, and if so, what is required to do so, they will give developers who have been too lazy to rewrite procedural VB6 code to OO VB.NET a legitimate reason to criticize MS.
Only time will tell if the shift away from the short-lived WPF and Silverlight to HTML5/JavaScript was a wise one. Very few Windows developers know JavaScript. Unless the VS11 tools are really good, this could be a serious mistake on MS’s part. I suspect good software engineers will utilize the same business and data tier code, but split the UI into WPF for desktops/laptops/netbooks, and Metro for devices.
If MS really wants to dominate software development, they should 1) enable, if not appropriate, Mono so it is up to the current .NET framework version, and 2) make sure the .NET framework (VB.NET and C#) runs on Linux, OSX, iOS and Android.
Come on MS, step up, take charge, and lead! You used to do that, and it is time to do it again. In case MS management hasn’t heard, there is a deep recession going on. Price accordingly if you want both sales and admiration.
Not to be picky, but it’s Sinofsky, not Sinovsky.
I can see this, but remember when Windows Mobile came out, it was on three architectures simultaneously until WM 2000 where ARM was the winner and everyone else was left in the cold. It was a shame because the Casio Casiopeia was the best one I used and that wasn’t ARM.
I’m sure that they’ll make some kind of cross-compiler thing for VS 2010+ or so. You’ll just need conditional defines to differentiate between platforms for ARM and/or x86 & x64. Still, if you define the libraries correctly, you can do that in an external DLL to code accordingly with the same main code.
Great article. Anything we can get on Win8 is an advantage. I see this as a great advantage for developers and those who want to bridge Intel and Arm. Instead of asking why an app won’t run everywhere why not adapt so that the functionality will run everywhere. Maybe this is a chance for Microsoft’s Office in the cloud to take off. We know dropbox will work over different environments.
Go with the Flo !!!
I think a few commenters here have not done their homework.
A) existing .NET apps will be relegated to the “desktop” ghetto
B) Metro apps are NOT required to be written in HTML. Metro apps may be written in C, .NET or HTML and all will finally use the same library: Win RT.
EvilFred is mostly right, but not quite.
It is yet to be seen if the Desktop is a ghetto. The Metro UI is a dud in a mouse and keyboard world, and fantastic in a toiuchscreen world.
I can see if MS wants to deprecate Windows Forms for WPF, but “mouse and keyboard” UIs are here to stay, so I suspect developers will make dual UIs – WPF/WinForms for “mouse and keyboard” UIs, and metro UIs for touchscreens.
Also, HTML is not a programming language. It is a markup language. I think it is commonly understood that writing an app involves some programming language (C#, VB.NET, C++, etc.) and a UI markup language (or prebuitl objects in the case of WinForms). UI markup was WinForms, and then became XAML with WPF. So now we replace the *markup language* XAML with the *markup language* HTML5/JavaScript when writing Metro-UI apps.
As of now, Windows Phone 7 requires Silverlight (a XAML subset) for the markup language. That shifts to HTML5/JavaScript in Windows 8 for smartphones and other touchscreen devices that will use metro. The bulk of computers will remain “mouse and keyboard”, so programs written for them will continue to use WPF/WinForms.
WinRT is a smoother blending of the Win32/Win64 API and the .NET framework.
At least, that is how it appears to me at this early stage of dealing with Windows 8.
Singer: according to what they said during the MS presentation, I think they showed XAML as an “option” for C or C# and HTML as the presentation layer for Javascript. It sounded like there are Win RT bindings for each of C/C++, C#/other .NET, and Javascript. So if you write an HTML/JS app the only programming language you use is JS, you don’t put any C# behind it
JLG, this makes Steve Jobs / Avie Tevanian’s moves on the Mach kernel and introduction of “fat binaries” back in the days of NeXT look like pure genius (at that time in the 1990s both Microsofties and G. Pascal Zachary (Wall St. Journal) were thumbing their noses at NeXT)!
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[...] in a break with its monogamous Wintel relationship, Windows 8 will support ARM-based tablets. This “forks” Windows and many applications in two different flavors. Here again, the once dominant Microsoft lost its [...]
[...] in a break with its monogamous Wintel relationship, Windows 8 will support ARM-based tablets. This “forks” Windows and many applications in two different flavors. Here again, the once dominant Microsoft lost its [...]