Microsoft has been waging a war against Chromebooks on a number of fronts, including reducing the price of OEM Windows licenses on machines with certain specifications, working with manufacturing partners like HP to develop Windows laptops that could compete with Chromebooks on price , and negative ad campaigns. The next phase of Microsoft’s campaign might be Windows Cloud , a version of the operating system that Mary Jo Foley at ZDNet speculates will only be able to run Unified Windows Platform (UWP) apps from the Windows Store. Foley goes on to predict that Windows Cloud may be released in conjunction with the Windows 10 Creators Update, scheduled for April.
If this story sounds familiar, it should. Microsoft conducted a UWP-only experiment with Windows RT, a version of Windows that ran on ARM-based hardware. The April release date that Foley predicts seems too early for the first wave of Windows Cloud machines to use the Win32-on-ARM emulation technology that Microsoft and Qualcomm have demoed. This suggests that the new machines might carry x86 processors instead, meaning that Windows Cloud machines could potentially be offered in a wider variety of hardware configurations than the ill-fated Surface RT devices. We’d be shocked if the price tag of the first wave of Windows Cloud machines started near the high $500 asking price of the original Surface RT.
