They were doomed the moment they needed “app developers.”
Nobody gives a shit about Windows. Nobody. Not one soul. It’s only exciting when it betrays you. Windows persists entirely because it runs the software everyone already has. Hell, I’m in Linux, and I’m still running Windows software, right now.
Would running arbitrary desktop applications on a phone be ridiculous? Yep. But no more ridiculous than making desktop Windows work like a fucking tablet. And now a decade later, high-end phones outclass my laptop from that era. x86 was even an option! Android/x86 was A Thing for a hot minute, and Intel had that little SOC that’d fit in a Game Boy cartridge. Would it run well, or run Windows well, or run Windows programs well? Nope. But it’d do a battery-sucking job of running all the dumb shit people wanted to do with their magical pocket computers.
The ultimate irony is that ARM devices can run any old Windows program now. User-mode emulators like Box86 pair with translators like Wine to fake both the hardware and software of a Windows PC. Microsoft could’ve done that shit, themselves, and pushed some .NET phone where the backend doesn’t matter. Like Android was fucking supposed to.
They were doomed the moment they needed “app developers.”
Nobody gives a shit about Windows. Nobody. Not one soul. It’s only exciting when it betrays you. Windows persists entirely because it runs the software everyone already has. Hell, I’m in Linux, and I’m still running Windows software, right now.
Would running arbitrary desktop applications on a phone be ridiculous? Yep. But no more ridiculous than making desktop Windows work like a fucking tablet. And now a decade later, high-end phones outclass my laptop from that era. x86 was even an option! Android/x86 was A Thing for a hot minute, and Intel had that little SOC that’d fit in a Game Boy cartridge. Would it run well, or run Windows well, or run Windows programs well? Nope. But it’d do a battery-sucking job of running all the dumb shit people wanted to do with their magical pocket computers.
The ultimate irony is that ARM devices can run any old Windows program now. User-mode emulators like Box86 pair with translators like Wine to fake both the hardware and software of a Windows PC. Microsoft could’ve done that shit, themselves, and pushed some .NET phone where the backend doesn’t matter. Like Android was fucking supposed to.