

Why it will be hard for Microsoft to "win" the future desktop/tablet/Win8 race - PixelRobot
http://www.brianmadden.com/blogs/brianmadden/archive/2012/01/06/5-reasons-it-will-be-hard-for-microsoft-quot-win-quot-the-future-desktop-tablet-win8-race.aspx

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derekerdmann
"And even if you have an existing traditional Windows app, if you have to
rewrite it, are you really going to choose the Windows platform? Probably not.
You'd just go with Apple or Android."

Um, why? If you're rewriting it, why would you choose the others? Android
tablet sales haven't exactly taken off, and simply starting over on iOS isn't
necessarily easy or cheap if you're used to Windows. If you're rebuilding it
for Windows 8, both tablet and desktop users benefit.

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jfruh
But there won't be desktop Windows 8 ARM users, so you'll have to re-engineer
it twice? Unless there's some quick and easy way to write code that compiles
to both architectures without fuss. But even then you essentially have to
build two UIs.

I wonder to what extent any under-the-covers code is shared between apps that
run both on iOS and OS X (like Pages, for instance) and whether there's any
economy of coding scale there.

~~~
derekerdmann
If you use the new WinRT runtime to build a Metro style app, you get both
architectures without any extra work.

