Several good points made; definitely worth the read. I completely agree with him on the topics of eliminating user confusion by disallowing people even the opportunity of failing to run legacy applications, but my bottom-line-point has been the same as Gruber’s from the get-go:
[If MS ships the legacy desktop on ARM] too many developers will think, Why rewrite and redesign my entire app when I can just recompile it for the classic Windows desktop on ARM?
Microsoft needs people to make great Metro apps to catch up with the battery life, stability and perceived speed of the iPad1, and they’re not going to get that if people can just punt and make legacy desktop applications instead.
The “perceived speed” of the iPad is not without merit. My girlfriend has more than once commented that things on the iPad just “feel faster,” despite owning a 12 month old AMD quad-core system. ↩
This isn’t so much a well thought out article as it is a dump or a rant. I’ll admit that. That said: it actually bothers me how badly Microsoft has dropped the ball on their 64-bit migration path. As to say: there is no 64-bit migration path, and they seem to be perfectly content with that.
A followup to an otherwise hyperbolic repost I made the other day. Bottom line is this: Siegler is totally correct. Microsoft’s continued efforts with the Explorer interface represent baggage. Sometimes you absolutely need to admit that your first iteration wasn’t perfect and scrap the things that were bad1. Microsoft, however, seems content to ride the Explorer horse into the proverbial sunset, addressing the wrong problems in the wrong way under the banner of, as Siegler points out, “respecting Explorer’s Heritage.”
Please, Microsoft, for all of us who have to use your products every day: drop what sucks. Keep what’s great. Move on.
