And I'm sure they're looking at how hard it was for them to port Windows to ARM versus Apple
Was it? Windows is pretty portable (at some point it supported 4 architectures) and Microsoft managed to port Windows to ARM pretty quickly. What difficulties did they encounter? Sure Windows RT was a failure but not for technical reasons.
It was mostly the inability to convince third-party devs to work with ARM.
There is a lot of major parties depending on old shit and unlike Apple, for good or bad, Microsoft doesn't randomly rip things out without a 10 year deprecation cycle.
MS also shot themselves in the foot with Windows RT when the first ARM32 port of Win8 worked. A PC with all the legacy baggage but artificially kneecapped to run no third party Win32 apps.
Windows RT (and Windows 8 in general) was their attempt to get rid of legacy baggage. WinRT (Windows Runtime that was introduced in Windows 8 as a base for Metro/Modern applications) was supposed to provide alternative for Win32 and sooner or later replace it. Obviously developers didn't like that idea very much, especially because WinRT was different and limited compared to Win32.
Yes, I agree WinRT was a good promise in a vacuum but most of us use Windows because there’s Win32 applications that worked for us for decades. Especially since we’re in a Linux sub…
And that’s exactly the main problem - no one (except perhaps a small minority) uses Windows for the operating system itself. They use it because the applications they rely on run on it. The moment you take that away (as with Windows RT), no one cares about the OS anymore. Which is why Microsoft likely will never be able to get rid of Win32 - Windows simply doesn't matter without it.
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u/nightblackdragon 3d ago
Was it? Windows is pretty portable (at some point it supported 4 architectures) and Microsoft managed to port Windows to ARM pretty quickly. What difficulties did they encounter? Sure Windows RT was a failure but not for technical reasons.