While Microsoft has been describing its coming Windows 8 operating system as a single-platform solution across devices, and has this week touted its support for Windows 7 apps, it turns out the truth is a bit more complicated.
In a conference call Wednesday with analysts, Microsoft Windows division President Steven Sinofsky revealed that Windows 8 on ARM-based devices will only run Windows 8 Metro apps, not legacy apps.
Company officials have been specifically saying or indicating that anything written for Windows 7 would run on Windows 8, but that’s not exactly the case. In the analysts call, a questioner said that Sinofsky had previously mentioned that “legacy applications will be able to run on Windows 8 regardless of the chipset that people are using.” This led to a question as to whether some emulator or app virtualization was being used.
Metro and x86 Apps
Sinofsky responded that he didn’t believe he had “said quite that.” First, he recalled his previous comments as saying that “if it runs on a Windows 7 PC, it’ll run on Windows 8,” but, he added, the implication he was making was that 8 was running on a x86 machine, as 7 does. Windows 7 does not run on ARM platforms.
Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer told a developers’ conference on Wednesday that one of Windows 8’s advantages would be that there would be 500 million devices with the OS. However, some significant portion of those Windows 8 devices would be ARM-based, meaning some differences in which apps ran on which devices.
In the spring, an Intel executive’s comments were criticized by Microsoft as being “inaccurate and unfortunately misleading” when she said that legacy Windows apps would not run on ARM-based Windows devices.
Sinofsky said that the company has been “very clear since the first CES demos and forward that the ARM product…
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