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Comment by rlu | Hacker News Reader

One thing is wanting to get users to use Metro more. It's another thing entirely to force them to use it exclusively by removing any other option.

Desktop apps can do many more things than WinRT apps are allowed to do. There are thousands of business critical applications running on desktop that are likely rarely maintained. These two reasons alone should convince you that Microsoft would be stupid to remove the desktop.

The blend of Metro and desktop is not meant to kill the desktop. It's simply a bet on hybrid devices (like Surface, Yoga, etc.) becoming the norm in years to come.

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If anything, I see RT as likely to accelerate the adoption of platform agnostic web apps in enterprise. It was already headed in that direction, but the lack of legacy support and the fact that MS has given IT departments no good way to centrally manage devices kind of throws the advantages they had in that market segment out the window.

If apps are going to have to be rewritten to run on mobile devices, why tie yourself down to the Metro platform when end users are wanting to run their LOB apps on their iPads anyway?

You can write Metro/Windows Store apps in HTML/JavaScript, C# and C/C++ etc, and you can use Visual Studio 2012 or the (free) Express version. This is much more open and flexible than writing iPad apps and it's something enterprises already know how to do.

Also, you can immediately deploy the same app to tablets, laptops and desktops, which isn't the case with iPad apps.

That's why the first sentence of my post was:

>I see RT as likely to accelerate the adoption of platform agnostic web apps in enterprise.

I am specifically not advocating platform-specific applications.

Microsoft has essentially thrown away the reasons for enterprise developers to tie themselves down to the Microsoft platform. If that's the case, there's relatively little reason to tie themselves down to any single platform.

C# code does require some modification to be run in a WinRT context, but I'd say the likelihood of code sharing with an existing C# application is still significant.

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