How Competitive can a Intel/Win8 Tablet be?

Can Tablet Manufacturers get below the $600 price barrier to successfully compete against Apple’s iPad line? Unless Intel and Microsoft lower their pricing on Clover Trail and Windows 8 probably not. So will the manufacturers opt for the less expensive ARM technologies and suffer the incompatibility of windows programs and ARM processors. This week we have been getting some tidbits from Microsoft talking about what Microsoft Programs will be available for their ARM based Windows 8 but unless other software manufacturers port their programs to this chipset they will not be compatible and thus will work on an Arm based Windows 8 Tablet. Will Microsoft Office be enough for user’s or not?

Ever since Steve Ballmer made that surprise announcement at CES 2011, there has been a lot of speculation about just how Microsoft would be bringing Windows to the ARM architecture. Would it be a whole separate line? Would it be compatible with old applications? Would it be cheaper? Many of these questions have been answered in a long and technical post on the Building Windows 8 blog today, as Steven Sinofsky explains how they developed (re-developed, really) Windows On ARM, or WOA, and why they made the choices they made. Some major points, for those unwilling to read: WOA will be totally incompatible with x86/x64-based applications; it will include a desktop only for Office apps and file management; it will be focused on portability, battery life, and "integrated quality."

Sinofsky describes WOA as “a new member of the Windows family, much like Windows Server, Windows Embedded, or Windows Phone.” It’s not meant to play games installed on operating systems from a quarter of a century ago. It’s meant to be a point of access for the current, and only the current, Windows ecosystem. It is similar to the “full” version of Windows 8 only in those parts that have been developed specifically for Windows 8.

Think of it this way. Windows 8 for x86/x64, in a way, includes Windows 7, Vista, XP, 98, 95, and so on. It is built with compatibility in mind, as part of a venerable line of operating systems. Windows On ARM includes only Windows 8. It’s as if the last ten versions of the OS never happened — though there are echoes.

This breaks the OS for some people — me, for example — but it could be a breath of fresh air for many. This OS is at once bare-bones and all-inclusive: it comes with a familiar version of Office, it will almost certainly be cheap and easy to deploy by the hundred or thousand, and it’s absolutely a known quantity.

Apps for WOA will all come from the Windows Store, and will all be Metro — except for Office (and a few other trusted programs), which will be able to run in the traditional desktop environment for productivity purposes. It’s a bit puzzling, this admission that the traditional desktop is superior for productivity, but it’s also the truth: an all-Metro productivity suite would be unfamiliar to Microsoft’s base. They’ll make it optional for now, and drop the other shoe later.

The focus on tablets is made plain: “you don’t turn off a WOA PC.” You don’t have sleep and hibernate modes. Like a phone or tablet, you just hit the button and it goes into a newly-developed low-power mode in which the battery will reportedly last weeks. These tablets, while they won’t run the “real” Windows 8, will be totally functional (it runs “super well”) access points to the Windows ecosystem. And with the increasing focus on cloud storage, web-based apps, and mobility, that limited access may start looking less like a bug and more like feature as time goes on.

It’s still early and this discussion seems to be changing daily right now. It will interesting to see what kind of price this type of tablet will be able to be launched at and how well it will be accepted by consumers.