@Razumir Three things: first, you might want to check the date of the last post in a thread before responding to it; second, I quite agree that it is a poor excuse, as does everyone else including MS and Intel, but the problem is that attempts to pry the desktop away from x86 by switching to other (real or virtual) environments - the IBM PPC Windows systems of the mid-1990s, Itanium, Java JVM, .Net Framework, and more - have all been resounding failures in one way or another, at least in regards to that particular goal; and third, it isn't the operating system that presents the problem, but rather the 3rd-party drivers and applications, especially the keystone ones, many if not most of which fiddle with the system on a lower level than they are supposed to, depending on undocumented features, existing bugs, and specific hardware implementations in order to work.
Worse, some of the workhorse applications, and many, many obscure drivers, no longer have the original source code on hand to recompile, so they would have to remain emulated until someone can afford to do a fresh re-write - something that was problematic enough eighteen years ago when the Y2K scare was in full swing, and isn't much better today.
Microsoft and Intel have enough headaches keeping x86 systems compatible with themselves; trying to emulate all the crap that various popular but non-compliant programs rely on would be (to borrow a simile from years gone by) the equivalent of repairing an airliner in mid-flight after a collision. No one in the industry wants the status quo, but until it reaches a crisis point, it is unlikely to change.
What kind of crisis, you say? I don't know, but it would basically be one large enough to make continuing with any of the existing software impossible. If you've ever read
Ringworld, consider the reason Louis gave Teela for wanting to go on the expedition: humanity was going to need the Puppeteers' more advanced hyperdrive, because even with a thousand years' advance warning, there was no way people were going to get moving to escape the galactic core explosion until the incoming shockwave was right on top of them. That's the sort of inertia we are seeing in this matter today: everyone knows that it is all going to fall apart someday soon, and most expected it to happen several years ago, but no one wants to risk losing their position and status until they've already lost it.
Hell, Intel has been looking for a replacement for the x86 since before it even hit the market: the 16-bit 8086 was an interim design that they figured was expendable, and the 8088 was a chopped-down version of that. They were as caught off-guard by its success as anyone else; their plan was that the real money would be in the
i432, which never even made it to production in any significant numbers due to performance problems. To the corporate managers, x86 is a cash cow, but the engineers see it for the gilded cage it really is.
