[nixos]

My question is how would this affect the market?

Apple will stay Apple. I don't think they'll go anywhere.

The question is Google. If this happened in 2008, I don't think Android would have taken off anywhere close to the way it did.

But now? One one hand, Android has millions of apps already on the market. On the other hand, Microsoft now has potentially millions of old, existing, applications.

I don't think it will make a dent in the phone market. It's too commonly used as a hand-held rather than a station, and windows apps are useless there.

On the other hand, it can tank the Android tablet market

[KMag]

I agree on the phone side. How many of those millions of apps are usable from a phone screen, using a phone interface? This sounds like cool technology, but this particular use case sounds very limited use on phones.

However, on the tablet side, it may allow Microsoft to bring down the price of the Surface a bit while still maintaining legacy app compatibility.

My understanding is that Intel caught up with ARM a couple years ago on performance-per-Watt, but how's the idle power consumption of 64-bit Atom processors these days compared to 64-bit ARM offerings? For many consumer use cases, idle power consumption has a bigger impact on battery life than does performance-per-Watt.

I'm a bit sad this news came out after SoftBank bought up my ARM shares, but I'm glad to see more evidence we may yet get the x86 monkey off our back.

[iaml]

A lot of WP fans seem to think that having desktop apps will help it gain a ton of popularity, but I think at this point people would probably like the idea, but it would still be a very niche choice.

[rbanffy]

My skepticism says it'll benefit HP's competition but, most of all, Microsoft, since whatever they do will be part of Windows and become available to every other Windows OEM.