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Comment by dmix | Hacker News Reader

Yeah, I'm not sure who the expected audience for this piece is. Programmers? IT people? Non-technical?

Seems caught in between them all.

My intended audience is, I guess, anyone who's ever taken something apart in a bid to figure out how it works. The ability to put the thing back together again such that the thing continues to work is strictly optional.

I hope it's deep enough that programmers who haven't been tracking Microsoft's efforts religiously will find it educational, but not so deep that someone who's merely interested in what makes the operating system tick is scared off.

I expected this to be a short, mainly fluff 1 pager based on the title. I was pleasantly surprised when it wasn't. In order to pass judgement on MS's design choices for WinRT you really need to understand the history of the technologies involved. I think that this does a great job of doing just that.

BTW, I fall into the "programmer who hasn't been religiously tracking MS" category.

Thank you for writing it like this. Parts of it I was quite familiar with, but parts of it I have zero exposure to, and I really like being able to review the parts I already know as a way to check your credibility on the parts I know nothing about. Only thing I found lacking was I disagree with the characterization of the OS/2 split - 'forcing Microsoft...' seems to imply a backwards cause and effect from my understanding of things. But if that's the only nit I can pick in such a long detailed article, then it's darned well done.

Here's a tweet from the author of the article before it was published that might shed some light on that:

"I have possibly the nerdiest, longest article I've ever written going up at 1930 Central tonight."

https://twitter.com/DrPizza/status/260154952868057088

So, I'd say the audience is nerds in general. I agree the article doesn't seem to have a definite target audience, but I think — in some sense — that is the beauty of Ars Technica's content. It's accessible enough that non-technical nerds can get value from it, but technical enough that more hardcore nerds appreciate it.

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