We are always fascinated when architectural foundations change, regardless of what market they start in, and we missed commenting on a key step over the CES period, the one whereby Microsoft promised that Windows 8 would run on ARM and support SoC (system on a chip) architectures.
Now there are already many implementations of Windows Mobile on ARM, and many might say that the change can’t be too difficult if it’s already managed it on a sub-set of the code base. But it’s not the same code-base and ARM has always been a factor in mobile.
What this statement really means is this, that Microsoft could not rely on the support of Nvidia, Qualcomm and Texas Instruments unless it put a serious and senior operating system on the line. You might argue that it already has Windows Phone 7 running on ARM, and that’s brand new. But without that public promise it looks like many potential Windows partners were set to evaporate.
There are two major issues here. Can it be done? And Can it be done in time? There are, of course, many answers to these questions.
If we had asked can it be done low power enough to put full blown Windows on an ARM based tablet, we think the answer might have been no. That’s what WP7 should have been invented for. Unfortunately Microsoft is continuing to insist that Tablets are built around Windows, not WP7. Now everyone knows this is a big mistake. WP7 is here now, and should have been Tablet ready. Microsoft’s motives for NOT allowing it to be used on a platform which is destined to make major incursions into the Windows market, are purely financial. If a large enough proportion of the market was allowed to go that route, it would hit Microsoft licensing revenues because WP7 licensing is necessarily cheaper than Windows.
But by not allowing it, it has sown the seeds of Microsoft’s potential demise. Rivals to Intel had no platform for pushing up from the ARM and MIPS platforms they favor to the Intel owned-landscape, and so would have to back Android to take that space. The Microsoft promise though is weak. In a world of multiple operating systems, players do not accept being told what they can and cannot use to make competitive products. Those days are over for Microsoft.
What Microsoft CAN do is produce a version of Windows, which will give ARM a seat at the table of laptops, desktops and Tablets, but not with the kind of low power requirements that Android has. Why? Because re-writing the Kernel or any other part of Windows with low power in mind, means getting rid of millions of lines of code that its developers will have almost forgotten are there. When you do that to an operating system, either it breaks, or you leave a little too much in, and you fail in low power. Or it takes forever. This is why new operating systems come along. Academics discover new fundamental ways of doing things, the chip platforms change and offer more power, but usually in a far simpler form or in a far more specialized way, or both. The assumptions that led to the lowest levels of code are no longer true, and it needs re-writing, from the ground up. And to do that takes an awful lot of time, and this is time when Microsoft is at its most vulnerable.
So the two questions, Can it be done and can it be done in time, are tied up together. To do it properly, it cannot be done on time.
And why would you want to anyway. When you run old existing apps on a platform like this, they will operate in ways that are now inefficient for the new kernel. You cannot really take all that Windows code with you, not even to a platform like ARM which now offers multiprocessing cores which can deliver as much power as Intel chips.
It leaves Microsoft in that halfway house situation, it has a perfectly good platform in WP7 that it might invest in, which is ready at the right time. But it wants to hobble it and offer something in two or three years which cannot be delivered. These two decisions will cede much of its homeland to Android and Linux.
At the CES announcement Microsoft claimed to demonstrate this next version of Windows running on new SoC platforms from Intel running on x86 architecture and from Nvidia, Qualcomm and Texas Instruments on the ARM architecture.
If Microsoft can do it now, why is the new OS not out there? Because it can’t flick a switch and put a new Windows out there, which makes that demonstration more of a publicity stunt than anything real. And it can’t let WP7 take on that role because it would lead to devices which would decimate Microsoft’s core revenue stream, Windows and Office licensing, because it has to be the same price as rivals to make sense at that level.
It is double binds like this which let rivals into markets which have always appeared impregnable, and to the hundreds of people that keep telling me Wintel is impregnable, I’d ask them how they’d solve this problem? Because if Microsoft just accepts that it will get less money from PCs and Tablets which replace them, then the shareholders would have every right to fire the management which took such a decision. And they would. All of this also makes Intel’s future look exceedingly hazardous, as if it didn’t have enough to deal with right now.