Microsoft's plans to stick Windows on ARM are not quite as doomed as an Italian cruise ship piloted by a Neapolitan captain, five miles off course sailing close to an island to toot at the inhabitants.

But analyst Stan Gold thinks that Microsoft still will not be terribly successful. He thinks that the problem will be a lack of backwards software compatibility on the platform, particularly if the industry does not quickly take up the idea.

If the universe greets Windows on ARM with a big yawn, then Vole will stop spending resources on it and the whole lot will list sideways and require some partners to swim to the shore. Of course Stan did not use these metaphors, he is locked in CES mode and so has not read a real newspaper for several days.

Talking to EE Times, Stan said that he thinks that the next big thing on smartphones, tablets or PCs will be GPUs and he predicts that with browser tech being GPU driven it can only get bigger.