Why Windows 10 on ARM Matters (Premium)

Windows 10 on ARM exists because Microsoft has already seen how slowly Intel moves to address real-world industry needs when it has monopoly control of the chipset industry. But Windows 10 on ARM is important­---yes, even to those who don’t see the point of the platform---for many, many reasons. And anyone who cares at all about Windows or Microsoft should be rooting for its success.

That anyone needs to explain this---or to defend Windows 10 on ARM---here in early 2019 is a bit troubling. But based on some unexpected feedback to a tip about an early peek at the native version of Firefox for Windows 10 on ARM, it’s clear that some still don’t understand the need for this platform. And that others are even hostile towards it for some reason.  (And in one weird case, hostile towards me too.)

This is wrong-headed. Windows 10 on ARM matters.

As Microsoft understands, monoculture is bad, and with AMD “circling the drain,” as one executive put it to me, it sought another strong industry partner to play against Intel. It found that partner in Qualcomm, a chip giant that ships far more silicon than even Intel does, albeit primarily on smartphones that are architecturally very different from PCs. Qualcomm isn’t just the biggest provider of system-on-a-chips (SoCs) and other chipsets on mobile, it’s the biggest chipset maker in the world by volume. So it has both the size and technical acumen to take on this work.

Microsoft understands monoculture because it, too, victimized its users, and with them, its partners and others in the ecosystem, when it became too dominant. There are many examples of this, but I’ll just point to Internet Explorer (IE) and the strange, years-long period in which Microsoft did absolutely nothing to advance its web browser because it had achieved market dominance. And because doing so threatened to undermine its then-core platform, Windows. After all, if the web became too sophisticated, users could more easily move to the Mac or even Linux. This is the kind of thinking that occurs in a dominant company, and it is protectionist, not innovative or user-focused.

Intel works the same way in the microprocessor market now that it has achieved the same level of success in PC processors that IE once held in web browsers. With the firm working only to protect this dominance over several years, innovation has come to a virtual standstill because there’s been no scrappy other firm nipping at its heels. And while the PC was never going to push back the smartphone wave, one wonders what might have happened had Intel realized the threat from mobile earlier and had worked to create more efficient designs for tablet PCs and other forms of mobile devices. The past six-seven years of PC decline are equal parts external factors beyond Intel’s control and internal factors that are very much Intel’s fault.

To understand the divide here, you need to understand the needs of the real world. While there a...