[crenshaw]

A couple of points:

* People forget that Microsoft is used to selling Windows that runs on multiple architectures. They had(have?) Itanium, DEC Alpha, PowerPC, and MIPS in the past. Of course those were targeted at professionals, not consumers.

* I don't think MS really cares that much about x86 native apps running on ARM. They care about desktop managed apps running on ARM. Why? LOB apps. LOB apps are managed and they want to support ARM tablet users having access to these.

* Related to the above point, there are actually few native x86 apps that really matter. Look at the Amazon top 20 selling SW list. It's basically: Office, Windows, Intuit, Adobe, and antivirus. Microsoft ships half of the top 20. They'll be shipping antivirus, so effectively shipping 2/3rd of the top 20. The only apps in the top 20 they'd need to get are Intuit (Quickbooks/Quicken/TurboTax) and Adobe Premiere XYZ. MS can probably have at launch 95% of the cycles consumed by native x86 apps on ARM.

With that said, for once, I do think Gruber is generally correct.

[gvb]

WRT your first point, Microsoft used to sell Windows on multiple architectures. They abandoned Alpha, PowerPC, and MIPS in 1999. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_NT#Supported_platforms A big part of the problem was that software vendors did not make non-x86 versions of their software and subsequently users were confused and disappointed that the software that they wanted to run on their (e.g. Alpha) computer either wouldn't run or had to run in an emulator and thus ran slower than on an x86 machine.

Microsoft supports two architectures currently: x86/Itanium and ARM with WinCE/WinMobile/WP7. There is no real synergy between the two currently, e.g. the "Office" apps that run on ARM are totally different beasts than what run on x86. The primary crossover is "mindshare" - i.e. users recognize the names.

[jevinskie]

They still ship Windows CE on multiple architectures.

[gecko]

And Xbox runs the Windows kernel and .NET on PowerPC.