""Unthinkable," said Horace Dedlu, a former manager at
Nokia. "These actions confirm the end of the PC era." Steve
Ballmer, the head of Microsoft, had just told the giant Consumer
Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas that the next version of its
Windows operating system, used on about 90% of the world's PCs,
would run on chips made by the British company Arm.
"Great news then for the British company, whose shares spiked,
and Ballmer also presented it as good for Microsoft, whose products
are used by a billion people around the world.
"But as Dedlu sees it, Microsoft has been herded into the move
to Arm by huge changes in the computing market that will see power
shift from the makers of PCs to the manufacturers of tablet
computers."