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Comment by ayi | Hacker News Reader

I know microsoft bashing is all the rage but something has been lost in translation here. What Satya Nadella meant was Microsoft will ship windows on different form factors (tablets, phones, PCs, servers etc) from the same code-base.

The OS kernel will more or less be the same. However the UI experience will be vastly different as you can image.

Mary Jo Foley explains it well here - http://www.zdnet.com/what-one-windows-really-means-and-doesn...

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That makes some sense; that's what Apple has been doing as well. Both OSX and iOS use the Darwin kernel and base, along with some shared user libraries, but then each has considerably different UI on top.

Just an idea here...

Maybe complaining about some of Microsoft's decisions has more to do with user frustration and less to do with being "all the rage"?

But it will only be the same code base to a manager or bean-counter. There will so much conditional code and special casing that maintenance will be a nightmare. Fix things for system, break the others. (Or "same code base" just means all stored with in the same repository.)

Same old Microsoft, same old mistakes.

Have you actually built a universal app? There is actually quite a good pattern for the separation of concerns here, you should check it out.

spoiler: It is not like what you are thinking, quite clean actually.

No different than targeting POSIX across multiple UNIXes, iOS vs Mac OS X and many other "almost like" systems.

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