Is it too late to split Windows 8 into desktop and tablet versions? | Hacker News Reader

Is it too late to split Windows 8 into desktop and tablet versions?

extremetech.com

15 pointsrbii18 comments

If you want the pure Metro version then just buy an ARM tablet. The battery will last longer, and none of that awkward old-fashioned desktop software will run on it, so you won't have to be bothered by it!

I think the bigger issue isn't that arm customers don't want a desktop, It's that desktop customers don't want to be forced to use an ill fitting touch interface.

Then don't run any Metro apps!

I can happily continue to run all of my existing apps without having to touch the Windows App Store, or any other locked down stuff.

The only downside is, apparently, the launch screen. If they don't see sense and allow a launch direct to the Desktop then I'll be annoyed.

I bet 3rd parties will provide a solution if that's not possible out of the box.

At the push of the button you'll be out of the Metro interface. It's not a hard concept.

If you wanted a tablet that had no compatibility with Windows - why would you get a Windows tablet?

You are stuck in the problem of either adding a 'bit' of backwards compatibility until you get into the state of supporting 1980s netware apps because some customer in one focus group mentioned them. Or you deliberately change things to differentiate it.

Exactly. This is why Windows 8's future is still very uncertain. If it wants to compete in the tablet market, it will have to be on ARM, no ifs or buts about it. But the problem is Windows 8 is starting from scratch on ARM, not unlike WP7 in the smartphone market. So why would anyone still want a "Windows 8 tablet" over an iPad or even an Android tablet, which would still have many more apps that work on it than Windows 8 for ARM? There's not a very big compelling reason to want it.

Corporates will buy it because it's Windows.

Average Joe will buy it because MSFT has a massive ad budget

Of the rest; (money>sense) > iPad : Android ;

I think you meant:

  (money > sense) ? iPad : Android ;

i.e. the 2nd '>' should've been a '?'

the added value of a Windows 8 tablet over a Windows Phone device is that a heavily-encouraged subset of applications will run across those devices and a traditional desktop. Windows Phone will only run desktop Silverlight applications out-of-the-box (and even those require some cajoling.) Windows 8 Metro-style apps will run across desktops and tablets without any additional work.

and 90% of the world still runs Windows on their "traditional" computers, so this is an appealing proposition.

I suppose it depends on what you mean by compatibility. It will be interesting to see if current .NET apps will be able run on top of the ARM CLR or if Microsoft will actually strip out support for anything that's not Metro.

Porting pure .Net apps should be trivial - if you also believed that Java was "build once and runs everywhere"!

But how many real world (especially corporate in-house) .Net apps don't also assume a windows file structure, or a keyboard, or a mouse or 8.3 names, or .......

So the problem is, do you sell it as "Windows" and deal with all the tech support and returns because it doesn't run Grandmas scrapbook app. Or do you run a massive ad campaign to tell everybody it's "Windows but not really Windows" !

edit: sorry won't let me reply to you -------------

That's rather the point - just porting the .Net runtime to ARM isn't the whole story. Can you have a single Windows8 design that does corporate desktops and smartphones?

If Windows8 for tablets has to have apps in "c:\program files", have 12 function keys, have a mouse with a wheel etc, for backwards compatibility then they are going to have quite a task to deliver iPad type tablet experience as well.

> But how many real world (especially corporate in-house) .Net apps don't also assume a windows file structure, or a keyboard, or a mouse or 8.3 names, or .......

I don't understand your arguments here. W8 is still Windows. The file system is still there. The keyboard is there if you plugged it in, and you can use the on-screen keyboard if not. Your app shouldn't be expecting 8.3 filenames unless it was written before 1995.

There might be complexities porting your app to ARM, but not because of the stuff you mentioned.

I've tried porting two Codeplex apps for cinterpreters to WP7.

The one which depended on a .dll couldn't be done because Silverlight doesn't support them.

The other which was self contained took me about three hours because I had no idea what I was doing because I am not a professional programmer by any stretch of the imagination.

I spent another hour creating a user interface so I could test it.

Windows 8 doesn't share a codebase with WP7 (except perhaps at a very low level). The Metro stuff on W8 is built on the new WinRT API/framework. What's hard to port to WP7 may be trivial to port to W8.

Disclaimer: I work for MSFT, but don't have any internal knowledge of W8 or WP7 that isn't public.

Given the ease with which I was able to port one project from codeplex, I am not surprised that Microsoft is lining up the ducks.

The project which I couldn't port (Ncalc) relied on ANTLR and thus a .dll.

The other (Irony) was .NET based and the main difficulty was cleaning up the structure created by VS Professional to Work with Visual Studio for Windows Phone [Express] and converting the console based code to event based...and that was easy even for me.

Anything that involves saving files will have to be reworked, since you no longer can use System.IO.. I'm trying to port a compression library and have run into this issue.

Good to know. A quick search online indicates that System.IO isn't gone, but does have a reduced set of classes. That could definitely affect some apps.

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