Did Microsoft Simply Run Out of Time On Windows RT?

CWmike writes "Microsoft may have simply run out of time with Windows RT, Directions on Microsoft analyst Michael Cherry said on Friday. Windows RT, the name Microsoft slapped on the OS earlier this week after calling it 'Windows on ARM,' or WOA, for months, is the forked version of Windows 8 designed to run on devices powered by ARM SoCs, or system-on-a-chip. Cherry was referring to gaps in Windows RT's feature set, particularly the lack of 'domain joining,' the ability to connect to a corporate Windows network and the lack of support for Group Policies, one of the ways IT administrators use to manage Windows devices. 'This is pure speculation on my part, but it seems like they had to make a trade-off with Windows RT,' Cherry said. 'What we're hearing now about Windows RT is a function of time and how they wanted the thing to behave. It seems to me that the a key goal was to get battery life decent and keep the weight [of devices] down.' His analysis on RT's chance of success: 'I think you can take Windows RT off the table for enterprises,' he said."

Comments

Re:It's a huge undertaking

[bheading]

On the contrary, Windows NT ran on MIPS, PowerPC and Dec Alpha back in the day.

Even after Microsoft dropped support for non-Intel architectures with Windows 2000, it was rumoured that they maintained the ports to ensure that they did not break portability.

Re:No.

[Enforcer-99]

They could be but I'd say that's a bad bet - trying to "out Apple" Apple. Microsoft has always had advantages in existing software compatibility and enterprise security features (say what you will - Windows Mobile had many more security features than Android or iOS for a long time). They seem to be casting off their only real differentiators in an attempt to copy the success of the iPad. This will fail spectacularly.

Re:No.

[squiggleslash]

If it were true that the excuse was they "ran out of time", then someone somewhere would be lying. The ActiveDirectory integration of Windows isn't written in assembler, and there's no reason whatsoever to think it even has endian issues given it's all standard Kerberos and LDAP (OK, with some added functions, but nothing that involves decoding binary numbers in quite that way.) It's fair to say that enabling it is literally a matter of enabling a compile time flag, and running it through the test cycle a few times to catch whatever very minor issues might come up.

So whatever the case, we can safely rule out "time" as being a reason.

Here's a couple of more probable solutions.

1. Microsoft sees tablets right now as being a consumer item.

Microsoft is not ruling out there being a corporate need soon, but they know that tablet makers are not going to be trying to push them to small and medium businesses quite yet.

And larger enterprises aren't going to want it either. Larger enterprises are conservative, they're not going to jump ship or start corporately purchasing swathes of devices that do not run the software they already have, which by and large is standard Win32 (or even Win16) stuff. The day larger enterprises consider tablets worth jumping onto is the day Microsoft is in for a world of hurt, because an enterpise that can do that can just as easily switch to Ubuntu or Mac OS X, or iOS, or Android, or whatever, too.

So tablet makers are going to want a version of Windows that's aimed at the consumer. They're not going to pay extra, and waste precious Flash memory, on unneeded extras.

The story is essentially hogwash. This wasn't a decision made in a high level tech meeting, but in a marketing department. Having been bitten many times before, Microsoft is being very careful in introducing their tablet operating system.

2. We haven't moved to IPv6 yet

That might sound like a weird comment to make but think about it for a moment. The primary feature we're talking about here is domain management. Domain management works when every computer that's in the domain is part of the same network. There's little or no point in it when that's not the case.

Now... what are the characteristics of tablets? Well, tablets are ultraportable computing devices. If a business hands them out to employees expecting them to only ever be used on the corporate network, then... well, why is the business handing them out at all? Why not just go for regular PCs?

And if they're expecting the users to use them anywhere, then without hacks using VPNs, there's not going to be a way of ensuring the tablets are always on the same "network" as everyone else until that network is The Internet, which is only going to happen once we have ubiquitous IPv6.

Essentially, you're opening a can of worms by putting domain management features on a tablet in 2012. If "time" is the excuse, then it's not in the sense of "We can't implement domain management in time", because that's a load of crap. But it may be "We can implement it, but once we implement it, everyone's going to see a whole host of problems that have always been there, but weren't anything like as important back when you could expect even most office laptops to never leave the office network."