Windows 8: BFD — Big Forking Decision | Hacker News Reader

Windows 8: BFD — Big Forking Decision

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24 pointsraganesh8 comments

This is why I think Google deciding to help Intel get into the mobile game was a poor strategic decision on Google's part. If Intel becomes a strong player in the mobile market, who do you think will benefit the most from it? Google? No. Microsoft. Because then they can get back to using x86 chips, while Google's doesn't gain much of anything, since competition in the ARM market was already strong enough, and Intel was far from "necessary".

Unless, Google's plan is to get Android on more x86 (older) machines, once the OS matures a bit more, and become a real OS choice for people using Windows today. But we'll see if that's their real plan, and if it is, how it will go.

Until then I still think Google's decision to help Intel take over the mobile market (if that's even possible at this point) will turn out to be a very bad decision for Android's future, as it will allow Windows a backdoor to get back on track. Google should realize that hurting Intel means hurting Microsoft.

At this stage, arm and cross platform web apps are here to stay. Improving x86 won't make arm less relevant, Google has nothing to gain by attempting to suppress x86. they've already won this battle.

"If Intel becomes a strong player in the mobile market, who do you think will benefit the most from it? Google? No. Microsoft."

But Google's hardware related efforts (along with many others) are a means to the end of ensuring their core business doesn't get shut out by one or more gatekeepers. If Microsoft benefits more in this narrow sense I'm sure that's OK with Google, as long as they don't use that to substitute their own advertising system for Google's.

Great review by Jean Louis Gassee. It will be interesting to see whether this forking risk is indeed temporal or risks growing into a real issue. Intel has slipped on maintaining a dominant position on the mobile chips platform. I think they're waking up to the issue: "What!!?? People actually use these silly tablet thingies as laptops substitutes? WHAT?" Not sure whether they can move quickly enough to respond.

Obviously it's a bitch to worry about whether your ARM device will run an old x86 app, but CLR/.NET apps should be fine, right?

Not necessarily if you're building a Metro app, which may be all the ARM devices will support. Metro apps get use of a small subset of .Net namespaces.

From what I can tell, the Metro subset of .NET is a projection over the real .NET 4 framework, which suggests that even on arm the full framework will be available. Either way though, CLR Metro apps should run on both x86 and ARM.

Logically, if you are writing a new app and believe W8 will sell a lot (probable), the go with the Metro since that gets you both chipsets. The problem with that is that Microsoft has been a little erratic since .Net with what I should write to. It is almost like Java and what UI library I should use. I do think the app store, if it only shows stuff that will run on your machine, will mitigate a lot of the problems.

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