Will WOA Fragment The Windows 8 Ecosystem?

Steven Sinofsky, president of the Microsoft Windows and Windows Live division, revealed the first details about Windows 8 on ARM (WOA) recently in the Building Windows 8 blog. Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer got a lot of attention (not all positive) when he said, "There's nothing more important at Microsoft than Windows" earlier this year during his final keynote presentation at CES.

However, with Windows 8 (currently in a pre-beta release phase) being split into versions for the x86/x64 desktop (Windows 8), phone (Windows Phone 8), and now ARM-based tablets (WOA), the question is: What exactly is Windows? Will Windows 8 (x86/x64, ARM, phone) fragmentation make Google's Android fragmentation look insignificant by comparison?

ARM (Advanced RISC Machines)is a processor architecture widely used in mobile devices. Variants can be found in tablets, GPS navigation devices, and even in digital cameras.

Most importantly, however, it does not run the same instructions as x86 processors from Intel and AMD, used by PCs running Microsoft Windows today. Microsoft supported multiple-processor architectures, up to and including, Windows NT 4 (prior to Windows XP). For example, some will remember that there were versions of NT 4 for the DEC Alpha, MIPS, and PowerPC processor architectures. Even today, Microsoft provides server versions of Windows for Intel's Itanium architecture, although it has announced that the current versions will be the last to support it.

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Tags: analysis