Microsoft accepts the Post-PC era with the launch of its Windows 8 – Part 2

One surefire indicator is that the worldl is now in a post-PC era. Those old metrics such as GHz and GB have given way to new metrics such as weight and battery life. ‘Post-PC’ has in many ways made the personal computer even more personal.

And Microsoft is positioning itself ready for the ‘post-PC’ era. It’s seeing the 30-year-old reign of x86 ‘Wintel’ architecture coming to a close and it is preparing for the new ideology. One such step is in making Windows 8 run on the ARM architecture. It’s not the first time that Microsoft has ported its operating system to run on different platforms (remember MIPS, PowerPC and DEC Alpha). Microsoft has always had an eye on the future.

But this shift to ‘post-PC’ is dangerous for Microsoft. It’s dangerous because it’s a big transition. Windows is very much a PC product, and much of what makes Windows what it is simply won’t carry forward to ‘post-PC’ devices. Let me offer up two examples.

First, legacy. One of the things that keeps people using Windows is excellent legacy support. Windows offers unprecedented support for old hardware and software. It’s one of the things that Microsoft is good at doing. This comes at the cost of bloat and bigger install images, but increases in disk capacities and processing power have offset that. With the move to ARM, there is no such thing as legacy. The word will not apply. The slate will be wiped clean and it will be a fresh start.

Now that’s not such a bad thing in many ways. Look at how Apple wiped the slate clean with iOS. It was a completely new platform, and people loved it. But it worked because Apple didn’t call it Mac OS, but instead called it iPhone OS (the iOS name came later). There was no expectation of legacy support because it was clearly a completely new product. But Microsoft is still choosing to call its ARM OS offering ‘Windows’ and I believe that doing generates a certain level of user expectation that the platform won’t be able to deliver. It’s Windows, but mostly in name only.

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Posted by Usman Khalid on Jan 19 2012. Filed under Sci-Tech. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.