Any mobile platform needs to offer four main things to make it seem a worthwhile purchase: a great battery life, fluid and stable performance, proper device and software update support, and enough app selection to get your work done. While WoA does tick the first three boxes, it suffers from quality app selection. Edge and many apps in the Store, including Office, should take care of most online needs but many users are simply accustomed to look for Chrome. Add to the fact that running Chrome on WoA with many tabs open is not a very rewarding experience and that the Microsoft Store still does not have the weight of iOS and Android, it is better to define your use case, check whether a decent app is available for that, and then take the plunge. Think about it. Why would someone splurge a grand on a WoA PC when essentially, the core performance and experience is no different from a US$300 entry-level notebook or even an iPad?

For WoA to succeed, it needs developer acceptance. That comes via increasing market share, which again is dependent on developer acceptance and so the cycle continues. While it is glad to take note that Microsoft is offering the necessary toolset for developers to port x64 apps to ARM64, it is still not known whether developers will have access to the low-level aspects of the SoC. Can they take advantage of the Hexagon DSP or the Spectra ISP in the Snapdragon chips to better leverage their capabilities? It remains to be seen.

WoA also inherits Microsoft's problem of perception among the masses. The Asus NovaGo and other WoA notebooks are definitely more capable than the iPad or a Chromebook and offer a nice productivity boost but people who pick these devices think that they are buying the full Windows experience. WoA notebooks ship with Windows 10 S mode on by default, which prevents running apps other than those installed from the Store. While WoA is far more capable than RT and of course iOS, public perception is what matters at the end. If their shiny new WoA notebook crawls at running Chrome with 15 tabs open, people will throw it in the bin. Microsoft would rather brand these notebooks and the OS itself separately from the traditional Windows offerings for perception's sake. The Xbox One runs Windows 10 code-indistinguishable from the PC but how many users are aware of that?



All said and done, WoA will only get better with time and with the evolution of more powerful ARM chips (assuming Microsoft doesn't axe it). Getting emulation right is not a huge problem for a company like Microsoft — remember how they enabled seamless backward compatibility for Xbox 360 games on the Xbox One? But in technology, the promise of a better tomorrow does not warrant an immediate purchase commitment today. The industry, developers, and users have invested a lot of time, money, and effort in x86 computing. It will be quite a task to bring a change and adapt them to new platforms poised for future mainstream acceptance. Therefore, while WoA makes for a delicious cake, it is still not worthy of the candle in its current iteration.

