Forgive me for the rant, I will try not to sound like a troll, as I am not one. I rest my foot upon my sacred BeBox and attempt to engage.

I kind of feel on a near-/mid-term view that the "age of the OS war", wherein the OS was the central watering point for app vendors, is dead and over. For the customer, for the user, it no longer really matters what OS is on the computer, as long as the thing works. If the thing has an App store, they'll use it. End of platform worries.

Yes, I really said it: the proprietary OS is dead. And so what we're seeing here with the way that Microsoft is addressing Win8 et al., is the long-tail/carcass of the 'one OS to rule us all' monster doctrines of the 70's and 80's, actually sort of a bit stinky, still left out on the playing field. The reality is, the OS value to the user is dead or dying. Most seriously useful apps in use will run on whatever is available, hardware-wise, and of course that means x86, ARM, and so on. A cross-platform, multi-build target codebase can be quite well served from left to right on the spectrum, if the proper tools are used, and those tools are done and out there.

Even OSX is starting to rot a bit in the sense that its OS vendor seems to be acceptably abandoning their Developers, or forcing them to choose sides, in order to control access to and rights of the User market. OSX is going to get less and less 'open and general purpose' while becoming, itself, a huge capital in the real $$-making realm of computers: selling candy apps on commodity hardware, directly to the user.

Developers as a reason for OS lock-in? Well, I think there that we're headed for walled gardens, with the trick being that ultimately, now that anyone can build their own walled garden for free or next to nothing, the OS as a host for Big Apps doesn't matter so much, so OS product managers are going to reduce the general-purpose/free nature of it.

If one builds ones app stack from boot to user with whatever one needs, and if the app is good enough, people will abandon making the OS decision as a necessary 'accessory', soon enough. It has happened many times, and now recently with iOS/Android app stores, its a huge win for the makers of hardware, and some of the makers of software.

Another thing though is that there is still nothing, and I mean nothing, stopping Samsung from having their own wide-open developer/OS front, in face of Microsoft. Nothing stopping them, but for groupthink. Say Samsung build and deliver a small footprint Linux machine for watching movies and home content, with the difference being the machine is 100% open, has its own onboard compiler/build-system, access to a common App store (namespace) .. well .. all this is a deadly affront to Windows8, come to think of it. I'm sensing "Panic!" in the product.

We just simply don't need Big OS. If your app is well-written, it can run on them all. Or, if you want, you can have your own OS and App sphere; CPU dies support such ideologies, they just haven't happened yet because there isn't .. yet .. a demand of the general public for having computer systems that will self-sustain through development.

Some hardware company will profit from this idea breaking through, soon enough, I think ..