Since the release of Windows 8 back in 2012, Microsoft has been targeting the market of portable electronics. The new tile-based user interface was optimized for touch use, and intended to be used mainly on tablets and portable computers with touchscreens.
Microsoft wanted to be part of the tablet market so bad that they even built a special version of Windows called Windows RT to run on hardware with ARM instruction sets (Snapdragon 800 and NVIDIA Tegra 4 chip sets in Nokia Lumia 2520, Microsoft Surface RT, and Surface 2 among others). Today, Microsoft has officially stated that this was a stopgap measure, while many customers and the IT press have long considered it to be a dead end.
Coincidentally, at about the same time, Intel decided to conquer the market of portable electronic devices and promote x86 architecture by subsidizing manufacturers who opted to use Intel CPUs in their phones and tablets instead of going for the then...