Comment by ghurlman | Hacker News Reader

Comment by ghurlman | Hacker News Reader

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Sinofsky also said that the Windows-on-ARM machines will come with several Office apps — Word, PowerPoint, Excel and OneNote — that have been tuned to run in a very battery-efficient manner. But Sinofsky said that, although those applications will run in the traditional Windows desktop, they will be the only programs allowed to do so, other than components of Windows itself. [1]

I'm still trying to wrap my head around this one... why would they limit the OS, instead of saying that Metro was it, and have the Office15 team build out Metro versions of their applications?

Having the desktop/classic mode be only for built-in utilities and Office seems, at best, extremely short sighted.

[1] http://allthingsd.com/20120209/windows-on-arm-complete-with-...

Just a guess, but Microsoft makes a lot of money from Office so I suspect the Office group insisted on being there at release to show existing customers their commitment. No doubt there are currently a lot of restrictions about what you can do on a WOA desktop, they may not have even provided anything like the full Win32 API. It wouldn't surprise me to see them loosen up those restrictions eventually.

Plus, by keeping all the desktop utilities like Explorer and Control Panel as desktop apps in WOA it reduces the amount of work that needs to be done. When Windows 8 is being used on a desktop PC you'll want those to still be desktop apps, and they probably won't be used enough on a tablet to justify rewriting them all as Metro applets.

I'm sure they insisted on it, but they could have done more than flattening the style on their buttons. Having Office as the lone desktop app is going to piss off more Windows developers than it's worth. Choose your own baby/bathwater, forest/trees analogy here.

Why do you assume that the Windows Store won't include desktop applications?

They may, ala iPhone & apps vs. web apps -- but I'm forced to take Sinofsky's word at face value at this point.

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