Very knowledgeable opinion sir. This is indeed true. Us as windows developers are required to add a sleep statement every few lines of code so as it not make it appear responsive.
Also, most devs probably build for the average performance, so say something like an old Core 2 Duo laptop, and if their app there has a 10% CPU utilization, it might have 30% CPU utilization on Atom, or more, which means on ARM chips, especially the mid-end to low-end ones, the same app will use the CPU a lot more. Apps designed for mobile are meant to use 5-10% of those ARM CPU's from day one.
A sleep() statement?! Novice! That won't even busy-wait! I like to loop around for a few thousand times writing nonsense to dummy variables. I earned those time slices - no way am I going to just give them back to the OS scheduler.
OTOH, I do a lot of Linux development on an Atom netbook.
So if that's really the case, maybe they are selective with it. Maybe they don't apply the same rigor to their own apps, which would be a shame since you'd think they have to set an example.
In my opinion, that is unacceptable. If MS couldn't optimize apps that ship with Surface, they shouldn't have released it.
They don't have time for that. Now there is only iPad with significant sales number. In 6 months Android tables will start to sell in significant numbers.
In 12 months opportunity to conquer world market with new tablet OS will disappear.
If Microsoft thinks that it can release a product with software that's not ready for release on just price parity with the market leader, they're delusional.
Apple spent the better part of 2011 (ie, last year) proving that iOS doesn't need a daddy OS around anymore - why is a USB host feature in a tablet meaningful for users? So that I can upload my picutres? Why not I just stream them to your photostream? or push them into your google drive or dropbox?
History repeats itself faster than ever.
Except the whole article was written about the Surface RT, and there are only a handful of first party desktop windows app allowed.
Every other app you ever install will be made brand new to support the new tablet ecosystem which will certainly target processors such as the one on the surface rt.
I think as people begin programming for Windows with an actual RT instance to test on (for example, the Surface), apps will become faster and more efficient. Personally, I haven't seen a problem with this as of yet; but, I haven't used that many apps in the store, just Netflix and MetroTwit, FreshPaint and a couple of others.
Disclosure: MSFT Employee
Developers never really cared about netbooks, and these devices, either with ARM processors or with Atom, are only at that level. So most Windows apps will struggle on these machines, while most apps on iOS or Android will be a lot faster on the same processors, because their low-end target was something like a 600 Mhz ARM11 CPU.