[citation][nom]Teramedia[/nom]if MSFT were really on the ball, they would have done an Android end-run with Windows RT.When Windows 7 came out, there was an "XP Mode" feature that allowed you to install Windows XP (and other O/Ses, for that matter) as a VM, with some odd limitations but also some unusual advantages compared to the typical VMware / Virtual Box implementations. Applications installed on the guest O/S could be launched and run just as if they were installed on the host O/S. User files on the host were shared seamlessly with the guest, so that double-clicking e.g. an Excel document could launch an instance of Excel in the guest, and load the file, and the window would look like it was running in the host.Apply this to Android running as a guest O/S under Windows RT, and what do you get? All of a sudden, Google Play, Google Apps, etc. become accessible. If the host/guest integration is done in such a way that the GPU is accessible to the guest, then you even get full gaming of all Android games. On your Surface. Seamlessly. MSFT could even go so far as to declare Apple's refusal to license iOS as a separate product to be anti-competitive, and push for the DoJ to force Apple to allow the installation of iOS as a guest OS on Windows RT.I mean, why not? Yes, the HW and in particular the CPU and GPU architectures probably need to be modified to support this, but the concepts for how to do that have already been figured out. If MSFT wants to truly own the tablet space, this would seem to be the most profound way to get there.[/citation]
That'd be a lot of hassle for MS and probably also Google and would probably have significant performance needs for a tablet. The Tegra 3's four cores would probably be able to handle it just fine since it would otherwise mostly be poorly utilized, but power consumption would probably be higher and it'd still need a huge amount of work. Such a complex system would probably be difficult to debug too.
Then the question of why comes in. MS has what should at least be a decent app store at this point and with that, what's the point of trying to get with Google's stuff too?
How can Apple not licensing iOS to others be anti-competitive? That's not anti-competitive at all IMO, that's forcing your competitors to use either their own or someone else's operating system and software platform(s) instead of piggyback on your success. I don't like Apple, but I don't see why bullying even them into doing something that no company should be required to do is fair. It's not fair to tell a company that they must share their technology when there are practical alternatives anyway.
Facebook
Twitter
Instagram