

What's the point of a Windows 7 ARM port? - ilitirit
http://arstechnica.com/microsoft/news/2009/05/whats-the-point-of-a-windows-7-arm-port.ars

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jcl
The point, I think, is to have something called "Windows 7" that runs on
netbooks. Microsoft doesn't want to be caught in a position where their
flagship product doesn't run on the next big computing platform, letting some
competitor become the de facto standard. This was the point of licensing XP
for netbooks (a suboptimal solution), and the point of porting Windows to the
OLPC XO.

The concerns over application compatibility are moot. If people actually cared
about that, they wouldn't be switching to Linux machines.

Running Windows Mobile is not a bad idea, provided they rebrand it "Windows 7
Mobile" and polish it to the point where it looks as much like a "real"
operating system as Linux does.

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pedalpete
Wouldn't the purpose of porting to ARM be to run on smart-phones and other
handheld devices. Seems to me most netbooks are running on the Atom processor
which is x86 based.

The comments that the author makes regarding peripherals and legacy
applications shouldn't be as big an issue, as you're not dealing with a 'this
should run on a pc' mentality, but rather 'will this run on a mobile device'.

Nobody looks at their iphone and wonders why they can't run photoshop. Yet, it
is an ARM port of OSX.

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ZeroGravitas
He addresses that point in the article. Microsoft already have the equivalent
of iPhone OS X, it's Windows CE for embedded devices and which is also the
underpinnings of Windows Mobile for PDAs and Smartphones.

It doesn't run standard Windows apps but neither would an ARM version of
Windows 7.

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ZeroGravitas
If I was Microsoft I would just ignore the ARM netbook market and hope that it
dies off.

People forget that Microsoft as a shareholder owned coporation doesn't have to
dominate every market related to personal IT, just make lots of money.

Strangely Microsoft seem to forget that too sometimes.

