If ARM becomes the next big thing, Microsoft is toast.

Jump onto ARM and their current duopoly with Intel is broken and Intel can start engaging in Linux for real.

Porting Windows 7 to ARM is extremely hard and Microsoft is the last place on earth i would imagine pulling something like that off. Winmo 7 is still left to be seen IRL and when it hits the streets, Android and Apple is miles ahead.

Microsoft cant follow, all it can do is try to stop things from happening. They succeded in stopping Java, could services and Linux for some time but they can keep plugging all those hole in the dam forever. Sooner or later they run out of fingers.

I’m calling your bluff on this one. You’ll claim Windows will be slow and unstable on ANY system. I used a 1 Ghz P3 with 768 megs for nearly 4 years on a single install of Windows XP. It ran great. Quake 3, Day of Defeat, and Grand Theft Auto San Andreas were my favorite games on that rig. When I retired this machine I used it to replace my aging Windows 2000 file server. Regrettably, I could not bright this machine with me when I went overseas.

(phones e.g. have an average of ~2 cores per phone too)

Also see:

A couple of innocuous words that have insidious consequences. A simple marketing tagline, yet it appears to be seriously undermining a vast segment of the computer sector. What is it? The phrase, “industry standard.”

It comes from the same warped (but ingenious) minds that coined the term “legacy” back in the 1990s. That harmless word served to forward the Windows NT – Intel processor gravy train at the expense of so-called inferior technologies like mainframe, OpenVMS and even Unix. Yet many would argue that despite all the genuine improvement to Windows in recent years to make it much more enterprise friendly, it still can’t hold a candle to many of these legacy systems.

The rumor goes that the legacy propaganda was originated between a Gartner analyst and someone in the Windows NT development/marketing camp. Whether true or not, it certainly helped sell an awful lot of Wintel gear. Now we have “industry-standard” weaving its way into the computer lexicon. The hidden intention appears to be to outlaw RISC and everything else except x86-Intel fare.

[...]

I attempted to track down the origin of the term “industry standard,” but I didn’t have much success. Web searches are sabotaged by the fact that the term industry standard architecture (ISA) was coined in 1981 for something else entirely. So it isn’t even an original concept.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=67j7JlEZzpQ
http://www.ted.com/talks/edward_burtynsky_on_manufactured_landscapes.html

Yes, I think this is the point. A cheap computer is now far-and-ahead of what you could ever get for 4x that price even a few years ago, and there’s no longer any reason to keep upgrading them, until they wear out.

Even my 6 year old laptop is still sufficient to comfortably run most applications – and I imagine it still will be until it breaks down (which being an ibm thinkpad with a warrantee replaced mobo & keyboard could be some time).

Maybe we’re finally starting to see the inevitable collapse of a business model based on selling obsolete hardware that needs to be re-bought every few years? I’d be a bit worried if I were a DELL or Intel.