Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer. Photo taken from Wikipedia
Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer’s keynote address at CES 2011, Las Vegas was chock-full of news as he announced the future of Windows 8, updates of the Windows Phone 7 platform, and tablet devices.
The most interesting bit of news, however, was Ballmer’s announcement that Microsoft’s next version of Windows will run on ARM systems using system-on-a-chip (SoC) architectures from NVIDIA, Qualcomm, and Texas Instruments – signalling that a big part of Windows 8′s strategy would include small and low-powered mobile devices.
“This announcement is really all about enabling a new class of hardware and new silicon partners for Windows, to bring the widest possible range of form factors to the market,” Ballmer said at the evening keynote address, during which he also showed off Windows 8 on ARM and x86 netbooks. (See video below from Gamespot)
To date, Microsoft has succeeded growing Windows into an $18 billion annual business based on PCs running the x86 architecture from Intel and AMD, but the increasing presence of SoC architectures in mobile devices is an alluring market that Microsoft can’t ignore any longer.
Windows 8 on SoC is expected to include the standard features one would get with Windows built for the x86 chips, including hardware accelerated media playback, hardware accelerated Web browsing, support for USB devices, and printing.
On Windows Phone 7, Ballmer said that the application development community has been quick to embrace the new mobile operating system, with the Microsoft download store having registered more than 5,500 apps in its first few months. Of course, it went unsaid by Ballmer that this is still a long way to go in competing Apple’s 300,000 applications on Apple’s App Store.
“Our customers get access to more than 100 new applications every 24 hours… More than 20,000 developers are keeping the pipeline full,” Ballmer said. He also said that Windows Phone 7 will get a significant update in a month or two, which would deliver faster task-switching and the much-anticipated cut-and-paste feature between applications.
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