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

No.

[realityimpaired]

They didn't run out of time on it. They did what they've always done with what they see as "consumer" versions of their OS: they deliberately left out certain network- and enterprise-related functionality.

Re:No.

[Overly Critical Guy]

Microsoft has always had a strong enterprise relationship, so it's more likely that the lack of IT features is due to a rushed release schedule rather than sales strategy, especially considering that the iPad has been seeing rising enterprise adoption rates, which Microsoft is almost certainly aware of. Microsoft just didn't have a choice, because they're so far behind in the tablet market that they needed to release something at all costs.

Re:No.

[Samantha Wright]

They could be trying to emulate the iPad. Keep in mind that it's done pretty well without features as strong as those on Windows.

Re:No.

[master811]

They didn't run out of time on it. They did what they've always done with what they see as "consumer" versions of their OS: they deliberately left out certain network- and enterprise-related functionality.

If that were true, I'm sure they would have an enterprise version of their tablet OS as well, but they still only have one version for the tablet. Either that or they simply think that the enterprise features just aren't needed.

Re:No.

[Overly Critical Guy]

But the iPad has enterprise features and is seeing increased adoption in that section of the market. It already has over 80% adoption in Fortune 100 companies according to Network World and is part of an overall trend in IT toward letting employees use what they want rather than company-issued devices like the Blackberry. Microsoft would most certainly be aware of this, but I think they just didn't have the time to address it.

Re:No.

[realityimpaired]

They had ARM-based code to join domains and apply system policies in NT4... this isn't some new reinvention of the wheel like "WinFS" was, this is a porting of existing code to a different platform, one for which they already had working examples of code to compare against.

Quite aside from that, it's high level code. You do not need to write the algorithms to join an NT domain in assembly or machine code, you write it in C and compile it for the arch. Porting a Linux distro to ARM does not mean rewriting the code from the ground up, it means recompiling with different flags... why would it be any different for Windows?

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.

[MightyMartian]

And meanwhile they're competitors have put at least some effort into interoperability with Microsoft enterprise software.

You Would think Microsoft would have a leg up in this area, if no other.

Re:No.

[SpryGuy]

Or more likely, they expect Enterprises to buy new Win8 slates/tablets with actual Win8 on it to get the enterprise features.

Re:No.

[Sir_Sri]

They may simple not envision windows ARM as an enterprise product either. A windows 8 slate with an AM64/x86 CPU *should* be able to have comparable if not longer battery life compared to the arm counterparts, better compatibility, but probably a higher price. For an extra 100 bucks I could see the enterprise guys quite happy to keep it as 'regular' windows. Hell, for an extra 100 bucks I'd probably pay that as a home user device.

The problem MS is making is assuming that the home market and the enterprise can stay separate. They can't. Your desktop should be your server, domain controller, manage your 'group' policy (for one device per user and 1-4 users I'm not sure the term group really applies but it's the same basic usage scenario). Someone who goes out an buys a windows RT slate and then can't take advantage of the things that make windows windows is going to be a very angry customer. Enterprise buyers usually won't have that problem because they will have someone who knows something about the tech decide what to buy hopefully.

Put another way, I suspect Windows RT is going to be a consumer clusterfuck, but not because MS has 'ran out of time' on it, but because they don't understand how users will want to use it. If people want an ipad, let them buy an ipad. Windows slates need to be a different product than an ipad, but having a windows 8 RT shitty ipad clone that's basically a big phoneless phone, and a windows 8 x86 desktop without a keyboard sharing name and shelf space doesn't seem like a great plan.

Re:No.

[PCM2]

I'm sure MS messed that up somehow, just like I'm sure you won't be able to "just recompile" your x86 applications on ARM without some big changes!

That depends how you wrote them, mainly. If it's straight C code which relies heavily on assumptions about the x86 architecture, then no. If they're .Net applications coded for the new Windows Runtime (which I understand they have to be, because you can only run Metro applications on Windows RT), then I doubt it will be too difficult to get them working on both.

Re:No.

[recoiledsnake]

Microsoft has always had a strong enterprise relationship, so it's more likely that the lack of IT features is due to a rushed release schedule rather than sales strategy, especially considering that the iPad has been seeing rising enterprise adoption rates, which Microsoft is almost certainly aware of. Microsoft just didn't have a choice, because they're so far behind in the tablet market that they needed to release something at all costs.

Exactly, you're perfectly explained why the XBox 360 can't join a domain either.

They must have run out of time! After all they always had a strong enterprise relationship, so the explanation cannot be that the consoles are targeted at consumers. Maybe they'll have time to add domain join and group policy to the XBox 720, I can't wait to run SharePoint and BizTalk on it.

Re:No.

[recoiledsnake]

They are indeed supporting as a BYOD (Bring Your Own Device), which makes more sense for a lightweight tablet.

http://blogs.msdn.com/b/b8/archive/2012/04/19/managing-quot-byo-quot-pcs-in-the-enterprise-including-woa.aspx

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."

Re:No.

[DarkOx]

I have to agree with this, despite what others are saying. Microsoft bread and butter is the enterprise market. Microsoft usually is pretty sensitive and aware of their needs/wants. Just looking at the wide market place that exists for mobile device management solutions; packages that try to glue Windows Domain like management infrastructure onto ISO or Droid; its pretty evident the enterprise IT world wants tablet software they can manage like your typical corporate desktop.

My guess Microsoft is aware that Enterprise IT has stalled as long as it can and pressure form the business both top and bottom to deploy tablets and smart phones to largish numbers of users is forcing them to act. Microsoft simply can't wait, once the F500 world gets substantial deployments of either Droid and IOS devices they are not going to switch.

If Microsoft does not get an entry into the table space NOW they will NEVER be more than an also ran there. It will (DROID | IOS ) + (Good | Zenprise | McAfee | Mobile Iron ) in the work place. There will be no consumer market for them either, as DROID and IOS already have that space and the only foot in the door Microsoft could get is the "well its what we use at work," late comers, who won't exist.

No this is pretty typical strategy on Microsoft's part. Get something out the door to stifle the "vaporware!" cries, even if it only delivers a tenth of the vision and promise the rest is coming in version inext.

Re:No.

[mystikkman]

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.

What nonsense. There are a whole host of Windows x86 tablets coming with full touch support and with new form factors which will be fully compatible with existing software and enterprise features of PCs.

And not to mention the fact that the author doesn't mention the enterprise features that Windows RT has.
http://blogs.msdn.com/b/b8/archive/2012/04/19/managing-quot-byo-quot-pcs-in-the-enterprise-including-woa.aspx

Very telling that the author is Gregg Keizer, who was involved in the scandals with faking Windows benchmarks to drive page hits.
http://www.zdnet.com/blog/btl/why-we-dont-trust-devil-mountain-software-and-neither-should-you/31024

And the submitter is CWMike, from Computer World. They know that Slashdot laps up anti-MSFT FUD and thus they use it to write drivel and get page hits from Slashdot. And judging from the comments, they're very successful in manipulating Slashdot for their own gains as they've historically with the fake benchmarks.

Re:No.

[gstrickler]

Not quite. NT3.x/4.x supported x86, Dec Alpha, MIPS, and PPC processors. It did not support ARM or SPARC. And, of course, they dropped support for all except x86. They did have support for ARM in Windows CE/Mobile, but whether that ever included code to join domains or Active Director, I can't say for sure.

Re:No.

[sosume]

My guess is that the features which were left out for either consuming too many resources while running, too many threads or memory, or for having use cases that were a nightmare. Tablets are not very secure and easy to steal. Perhaps they have bigger plans to address these left-out features in further servicepacks, so Win 8 SP2 will be the version to look out for.

Re:No.

[rrohbeck]

Writing portable C code is not rocket science. Writing something as arch independent as network protocol code in an arch dependent way is incompetent. I don't think MS coders are. Their management sometimes is, so I assume it was a deliberate decision to leave these features out, maybe to keep ARM out of the enterprise in favor of the heavier(more profitable?) x86 products.

Re:No.

[Billly Gates]

There are great IT features on Windows 8. Just on the x86 ones. If it were not for Metro Windows 8 would be a great desktop upgrade. Virtualization support is very strong.

It seems WOA is crippled because either
1. Win32/64 has some x86 specific code
2. MS can't sell Windows 8 WOA for $199 if the tablet is only worth $250. Especially if MS wants it to be competitive with Android.
3. WinRT is battery efficient and this is important. Many researchers still use TRS-80s because they get 20 hours of battery life believe it or not when they are in the middle of nowhere like the Alaska Aleutian Islands
4. Domain joining simply is not practical as its static. I have made a lot of angry sales people who are joined to a domain and can't get Windows or Anti virus updates because they only go to an office once a year. I begged the IT director to kick them off the domain and give them a stripend for local IT support if they fuck them up. She didn't want to hear it.

My guess is 2,3,4 are the reasons. MS has demonstrated you can manage them without a domain. This example showed corporate apps on a non joined Windows 8 tablet.

Active Directory needs to go. Its a POS. Novel clearly had the better product and in a world of wireless communication outside the office it just does not fly. My guess is Windows 9 will include just that and give corporate America a reason to finally leave XP behind, and Windows 7 by then will be aging as well.

MS wants to charge a fortune for Active Directory integration and for enterprise customers. Plain and simple.

Re:No.

[Billly Gates]

Active Directory is the problem.

Times are changing. People are working from home, on the road, and from other devices that are wireless. How does IT manage it? They can't. AD is static and not tablet or work from home family.

The fact that these enterprises are still using IE 6 and 7 are showing the problem. They can't leave as it is unmanageable if you have 5,000 people in 4 continents.

Windows 8 solution is to simply reset it to a previous state. That might work fine for every problem if all your data is on the cloud anyway. WinRT helps this. Zdnet (Windows troll I know) had an article demonstrating this.

I think a new manageability services that work with a hotmail or office365 account that can be managed over the internet might be an excellent replacement. Standard desktops frozen in time are the worst for everyone and become hard to manage as you lock them down.

Re:No.

[recoiledsnake]

The Windows RT tablets will come bundled(for free?) with the Mother of All Enterprise apps, Office and the article doesn't even mention that.

Re:No.

[Eirenarch]

iPad can join domains? (real question)

Re:No.

[Dusty101]

Yes, but isn't it the case that is going to be a Windows CE-style cut-down, brain-damaged version of Office?

And if so, is it really going to be that much better/compatible than things like "Documents To Go" that people already have on the iPads they already have?

Re:No.

[thetoadwarrior]

So there is no expectation that businesses will use Windows on ARM? That sounds like they're giving up to Apple.

Re:No.

[Eponymous Coward]

Apple's success in corporations has been in spite of their indifference toward the enterprise market. They are consumer focused and getting more so all the time.

The big surprise for me is how badly RIM has done in this sector.

Re:No.

[MightyMartian]

That appears to be no different than the capacity of Home editions of Windows operating systems to work on AD domains because the "Home" client will cache the credentials and pass it on to the domain-connected host (heck, I've done it with a Samba domain member that will act as an authentication broker pass on authentication of non-domain workstations to a domain controller those work stations can't even see). Absolutely nothing new about that, and authentication is only a part of it. We're talking about GPOs here, about automating configurations, about site-based configurations, and so on and so forth.

I realize that tablets are not PCs, but I could well see the value of putting them on there own OUs and rolling out GPO settings for printers, shares, encryption settings and the like. Nothing I've seen about Windows RT suggests to me that it has the least advantage over an Android or Apple tablet. The one area where Microsoft has the higher ground, where they could create devices that would have a marked advantage over the competition, and all they do is basically supply the same abilities the competition does. I thought Microsoft was inevitably losing ground on the consumer front, I had no idea they were going to end up damaging themselves in the enterprise.

Re:No.

[Anonymous Coward]

through exchange yes, and you can push policy, which can be good and bad, like when our IT department wiped all ipads connected, one wrong script..

Re:No.

[The Second Horseman]

No, it can't. The only tablet I'm aware of that can do any sort of enterprise auth out of the box (against Active Directory) is the Lenovo Thinkpad tablet (Android). You can use your AD password to lock/unlock the device. They also preload a Citrix client into the tablets.

Re:No.

[Anonymous Coward]

It's a trend where CEOs and top levels execs start using devices and expect them to work for their e-mail as well. IT is behind the times and this trend is now being called 'BYOD'. All those enterprise IT functions are not for the benefit of the users and they often hinder the use of the device as was intended. So what we see is a trend where IT will have to support/connect more consumer oriented devices to their network. Security departments scream bloody murder, but the risk is accepted by the organisation so there is no real reason not to connect these devices. RIM is failing where Apple is succeeding, because Apple's devices are actually fun to use as opposed to merely functional and fully controlled.

Re:No.

[Trilkin]

Uh, what? Work-from-home/road problems with AD have -LONG- been solved with VPNs. They marry very well with AD and have for a while.

Re:No.

[flimflammer]

Wow, really? Do you really think the Xbox 360 and WinRT are both even remotely comparable in terms of enterprise desirability to make such a wacky comparison?

Re:No.

[countach]

I hardly think they're becoming more consumer focused over time. They did after all add a whole bunch of enterprise features to iOS like support for Outlook server, and remote wipe.

Maybe the reality is that Apple see all these so-called enterprise features as legacy, and they don't see that tablet users should be or need to be using them. Maybe Apple is ahead of the curve on this. Maybe, as so often happens, reality will change to conform to Apple, and not the other way around.

Re:No.

[MidnightBrewer]

I hope Microsoft is skipping these features by design, because it would make them look pretty intelligent. A tablet does not need all of the domain bells and whistles that a desktop in the enterprise does; at most, it needs to be able to sync to a particular desktop, which is secure enough. Beyond that, make sure the tablet is sandboxed so that it can't become a vector for viruses and you already have all the advantage you need to becoming integrated into a Windows environment. I think bemoaning the lack of these features is premature.

Re:No.

[cnettel]

No, it is Office alright. Maybe with some touches to the interface, and you can forget about getting anything relying on a 3rd party COM object to work, but it is Office recompiled. It will be closer to Office on x86 Windows than Office on Mac ever was. (Yeah, even in the disastrous times when Macintosh Office was all piped through some weird Win32 emulation...)

Re:No.

[Tough Love]

The security risk isn't always acceptable. Google banned Windows laptops after they got owned by China, now you need executive permission to connect one to the internal network.

Re:No.

[Tough Love]

I'd say that's a bad bet - trying to "out Apple" Apple.

True. Apple has had more success at trying to out-evil Microsoft.

Re:No.

[hairyfeet]

This would be correct IF they had "WinRT Enterprise" but they don't. Since they do not the most likely conclusion is what I have been saying since the Dev preview which is Win 8 is a "Hail Mary" because they are getting curb stomped by Android and Apple in the mobile space and come hell or high water they are kicking that sucker out for the Xmas season.

Personally with all the hatred I've seen from customers trying the consumer preview in my shop I think its not gonna matter WHAT CPU you slap this turkey on its gonna bomb. In the end MSFT really only has TWO choices, 1.-Spin off the mobile division so they can get out from under the legacy of Windows and can sink or swim with Metro OS, or 2.-Accept that they are the new IBM and while making buttloads o' cash will never be the top of the heap again like they were in the 90s.

What we are seeing with MSFT is the same thing we've seen with dozens of once successful companies that got blindsided by new tech. You have a lame CEO who was coasting on past success and assumed that success would last forever, you have a company that is too slow and too large to nimbly react to changing trends, and you have changes in technology that have stopped their endless upward profits, specifically the facts that once PCs hit multicore there haven't been any real "killer apps" to drive new purchases and unlike the "MHz Wars" that MSFT got so rich off of the PC has reached a plateau where the tasks the vast majority have can easily be done on a cheap netbook or even a 5 year old laptop while at the same time the two year contracts and rapid advances in mobile tech have made cell phones and tablets the new MHz Wars where people will go through 4 or 5 phones in the time it takes them to retire a single desktop.

So I'd say the solution is obvious, since they are simply too large and bloated to even listen to their beta testers they need to spin off mobile so it can be nimble and change without going through the whole bloated bureaucratic mess or simply accept they will never own mobile like they do the desktop and kick back and enjoy the money. But rushing out a half ass WinRT while at the same time taking a big crap on desktop users just shows how lost and behind the curve Ballmer really is IMHO. He honestly think he can shove out a half baked product and the MSFT name will carry them. Well come Oct I bet he gets a rude awakening as that strategy didn't work for WinPhone 7 and all the strategy will do with Win 8 is cause a Vista style backlash.

Re:No.

[binarylarry]

They are the same amount of evil, Apple just operates much more efficiently.

Kind of like the difference between an evil mastermind and his bumbling henchmen.

Re:No.

[Kleen13]

Just cause you say it doesn't make it a fact. Cite it, Jack.

Re:No.

[jonadab]

> My guess is that the features which were left out for either consuming
> too many resources while running, too many threads or memory, or ...

Very plausible, but also...

> Tablets are not very secure and easy to steal.

This.

On a Microsoft Active Directory network, information about *all* accounts on the system, including the domain administrator accounts, is stored on every device that is allowed to join the domain. That includes information about the passwords. (Why? Because if a domain controller goes down and suddenly every single computer in the department can't log in, people become very upset. A more sane approach, from a security perspective, would be to only give each local system account information for accounts that have recently been used to log into that local system; but AFAIK Active Directory doesn't do things that way. Certainly as of Windows XP it didn't, and if that has changed I missed it.)

The passwords are not stored in the clear, but the information that is stored would be a significant boon to an attacker if he could walk away with it and do some processing for a while (say, on a botnet) and come back to log in next week or next month. Joining the domain in the first place is a security barrier -- you need a domain administrator's permission to join any computer to the domain. Once the computer is joined to the domain, however, it gets domain information, including account information, including hashed passwords. If an attacker can compromise ANY of the computers on the domain -- by, for example, physically removing their hard drive and plugging it into another computer -- he can bypass such things as login retry timeouts and thus can test as many passwords per second as he pleases, limited only by computing resources (chiefly, CPU time).

(He might possibly even be able to use massive precalculated hash tables, if MSAD still doesn't use salt. I don't happen to know whether it does or not. It certainly SHOULD, but with backward compatibility being crucial to Microsoft's business, *especially* in the enterprise, I wouldn't be altogether shocked to the core if there were no salt, or if it were turned off by default and you had to deliberately disable compatibility with older OS versions to turn it on. Anybody who happens to know, feel free to chime in here.)

So yeah, laptops on a MSAD domain are probably a bad enough idea in most cases, but tablets would be worse. This doesn't mean Microsoft won't figure out a way to make tablets on the domain happen (I'm sure they will, eventually), but now that they're trying to take security (somewhat more) seriously, they may be trying to sort out these kinds of implications first. If so, that would be a good thing.

Re:No.

[gstrickler]

A completely different architecture. MIPS vs ARM.

And I presume you're the same AC who wrote

Look up Windows NT on wikipedia retard...

NT 4.0. The mention of ARM as a supported platform under Windows NT refers to Windows 8.

I hate idiots.

Re:No.

[BenJCarter]

Hard to swim for the mobile market while chained to the enterprise PC market. Will the MS model remain profitable when the primary web access vector is appliance based?

Re:No.

[Dusty101]

Ah, OK. Cool: thanks for the clarification. A lot of the stuff I'd read on this hadn't been very clear on this point.

Re:No.

[Eponymous Coward]

They have made other moves that support my claim that they are becoming more consumer focused. They stripped out lots of pro-level features from Final Cut Pro, making it more like iMovie. Their big developer conference (WWDC) used to be somewhat evenly divided between consumer tracks and tracks for IT people. A couple of years ago, they dropped the IT stuff. They've also dumped their line of servers a year or two ago.

Apple is more consumer-focused than ever.

Re:No.

[Anonymous Coward]

What about the time when the various components of Office were Mac-only programs and there was no Windows? Yeah, I'm talking about that tiny sliver of time called 1985. Excel was Mac-first, and for a while, Mac-only.

Scary, but it explains a lot about why Excel is as screwed up as it is. IIRC, Word and Excel were "ahead" on Mac until version 5.0, since Windows was not yet fully up to the task until 3.x.

Also, there was never a time when Office was "piped through some weird Win32 emulation". There was only a hack-job version of VBA on board. Nobody used it, since the old-school Applescript bindings were still there and still worked properly. The next version expanded on them and dropped VBA compatibility forever, to the frustration of Mac-supporting IT departments everywhere. Macros didn't work on the Mac, at least not the VBA ones with extra enterprise-y cream filling.

Re:No.

[Sir_Sri]

I'm not sure MS cares about the 200 dollar price point, nor particularly does android. 500 dollars, 600, maybe. For 600 bucks an ipad replacement that runs windows or ubuntu or, and does whatever the hell I want is preferable to a 500 dollar ipad that doesn't, bonus if it's x86 so it just works with every other windows app in the world.

Re:No.

[Sprinkels]

Only logon information about accounts that have logged on onto that device are being cached. Not all accounts, that would too resource intensive. Also that information is not obtained from a domain controller, but from user input.

So you can only compromise accounts that are used on that computer. However if you could steal a domain controller than you are correct. But the same goes for authentication servers from any other vendor.

Re:No.

[master_p]

Micriosoft code is well known for its bit twiddling features. If you come across the leaked code of an old version of Windows, you will be amazed on how much low level code is there. They use the preprocessor and shift opeators arbitrarily. For me, it is not a surprise to see any part of Windows failing to run properly on ARM due to the low level hacks for the x86.

Re:No.

[toolo]

That's called any device with an ActiveSync client. So, you are not 'joining the domain', you are connecting to Exchange in a similar method that a blackberry connects to BES.

Re:No.

[toolo]

Correct- you can do just about anything anyone cares about through ActiveSync (mail) and Lync (messaging/VOIP) on a tablet. Bloat is unnecessary. Storage on Skydrive. IMHO connecting to the domain is becoming obsolete.

Re:No.

[toolo]

That doesn't say anything about Microsoft, it speaks to their security. They should treat every corporate user as an external user with a profile that controls their level of trust. That is where the market is going.

Re:No.

[SirAdelaide]

They'll release the rest as DLC

Re:No.

[Tough Love]

It says everything about Microsoft.

Re:No.

[Guy Harris]

That depends how you wrote them, mainly. If it's straight C code which relies heavily on assumptions about the x86 architecture, then no. If they're .Net applications coded for the new Windows Runtime (which I understand they have to be, because you can only run Metro applications on Windows RT), then I doubt it will be too difficult to get them working on both.

What if it's straight C or C++ code that doesn't rely heavily on assumptions about the x86 architecture?

Re:No.

[Guy Harris]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_NT

Look on the side under "Supported Platforms".

What do we see there? ARM!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

M$ has been maintaining the codebase for windows on all these architectures since the dawn of time. They don't even need to recompile they already have a build compiled. Apparently M$ is a retard and refuses to give anybody what they demand and will probably go the way of the dodo.

(Link added for the benefit of people who have better things to do with their time than copy-and-paste the URL or select it and use whatever your browser supports for "follow selected item as a link" if your GUI and/or browser support it.)

Presumably you're making fun of the people who would incorrectly infer from the Wikipedia entry in question that ARM really has been supported since Day One (ARM support was first added to the article with the comment "Supported platforms: Added "Windows 8" on ARM" and the "supported platforms" item was added to the infobox after that).

Re:No.

[Guy Harris]

Look up Windows NT on wikipedia retard...

And, when you read it, don't incorrectly infer from the fact that it mentions ARM support that the NT code base has supported ARM since Day One. The page for Darwin lists ARM as a supported platform in the infobox, but that doesn't mean that there was ARM code in Darwin since Day One, and the page for Linux lists ARM and a bunch of other architectures as supported platforms in the infobox, but that doesn't mean there was support for all those architectures in the Linux kernel since Day One.

Re:No.

[Guy Harris]

Micriosoft code is well known for its bit twiddling features. If you come across the leaked code of an old version of Windows, you will be amazed on how much low level code is there. They use the preprocessor and shift opeators arbitrarily.

I'm not sure what you mean by "the preprocessor" here, but using the C preprocessor in your code hardly makes it non-portable bit-twiddling code. Not being careful when using the C shift operators (e.g., writing code that shifts left by a variable amount and that works only if, when the variable amount is equal to the number of bits in the quantity being shifted, the result is 0) can make your code non-portable.

I'm also not sure what you mean by "an old version of Windows"; as has been noted several times in comments here, Windows NT ran on MIPS, Alpha, and PowerPC as well as on x86, so what "bit-twiddling features" it used either ran on more than just x86 or was buried in the platform-specific parts of the code.

Re:No.

[Guy Harris]

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?

Because that subset of "regular PCs" known as "notebooks" or "laptops" are also portable computing devices that are not guaranteed "only to ever be used on the corporate network". Tablets are not some form of magical device that suddenly lets you take your computing with you (regardless of how whether any Apple spokespeople said "magical" during any particular Apple tablet's announcement); that flavor of mobile computing existed before the iPad (or other tablets).

And if they're expecting the users to use them anywhere, then without hacks using VPNs

Perhaps they're not expecting that - perhaps they're expecting them to be used with VPNs if you want to get on the corporate network, just as with laptops.

Re:No.

[shutdown -p now]

In that sense, Windows RT tablets can "join a domain" as well (and also have restrictions applied etc). But it's not really joining a domain as such, no.

Re:No.

[shutdown -p now]

There's more to enterprise support than C algorithms. Windows RT doesn't support third-party Win32 applications, so clearly, significant portions of Windows didn't survive the transition to ARM.

That's a wrong conclusion. Keep in mind that not only it has the classic desktop with all the same Win32 apps running on it that you see in any default Windows install - stuff like Explorer and Notepad and desktop version of IE - but it also runs full-fledged Office. So, no, all the good old Win32 is there. The lack of support for third-party Win32 apps is purely a marketing decision, not a technical one.

Re:No.

[shutdown -p now]

Given that we're talking about an architecture with the same word size and the same endianness as x86, why would bit twiddling hacks be a portability issue? Porting to x64 is actually harder, and it was already done years ago.

Re:No.

[shutdown -p now]

If that were true, I'm sure they would have an enterprise version of their tablet OS as well, but they still only have one version for the tablet.

Windows RT is not a "version for the tablet". It's a version for the ARM tablets, specifically. You know, low-powered (relative to Intel), compact devices with long battery life. If you want a tablet that can do it all, you can get an Intel-based one, install any edition of Win8 on it, and join it to domains and run any software on it.

Re:No.

[shutdown -p now]

Uh, what? Work-from-home/road problems with AD have -LONG- been solved with VPNs.

VPNs are so last year. DirectAccess (which is basically IPv6 tunneled via IPsec with zero configuration on the client) is where it's at in Windows land these days.

Re:No.

[jonbryce]

Not so much of a surprise when you consider that they released a slab that initially couldn't do email.

Re:No.

[oldbamboo]

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.

What nonsense. There are a whole host of Windows x86 tablets coming with full touch support and with new form factors which will be fully compatible with existing software and enterprise features of PCs.

And not to mention the fact that the author doesn't mention the enterprise features that Windows RT has. http://blogs.msdn.com/b/b8/archive/2012/04/19/managing-quot-byo-quot-pcs-in-the-enterprise-including-woa.aspx

Very telling that the author is Gregg Keizer, who was involved in the scandals with faking Windows benchmarks to drive page hits. http://www.zdnet.com/blog/btl/why-we-dont-trust-devil-mountain-software-and-neither-should-you/31024

And the submitter is CWMike, from Computer World. They know that Slashdot laps up anti-MSFT FUD and thus they use it to write drivel and get page hits from Slashdot. And judging from the comments, they're very successful in manipulating Slashdot for their own gains as they've historically with the fake benchmarks.

That's right - I need to look at this more, but you people should give MS a HELL of a lot more credit for what they are doing here. BYOD is the security nightmare du jour, ever since the iPad came out. Our security team have spent huge resources, and are still woefully under-resourced to make managing these devices day in day out remotely safe enough. The last thing you'd want to see, and the first thing you'd demand - from an info sec perspective - is that AD not be baked into this consumer oriented OS. Until Win RT is a couple years old every security team worth their salt would nix any directory / infrastructure tie up with a device which is easily lost, unhardened (at least through painful experience) and virtually an Alpha product.Yes it can be done, but the overhead is massive and most people wont have the headcount to secure bridging the two safely - and KEEPING THEM SAFE. Releasing in this form provides entry to a consumer market, and a platform which has a lot of the headache of apps installed from Lines of Business fixed through the separate publishing infrastructure (which the original article is ignorant of, or lying). Staff get their tablets. It sounds to me that MS are getting a head start on Android and iOS. Read the link the guy above posted. They have provided a tiered, clean way of getting business apps to a consumer device. It still requires security risk assessments and penetration testing of the apps (which would need hella strong authentication / 2FA for anything which holds sensitive or above data, but the lack of the 'generic' client for the enterprise directory will make this much easier to deploy and work with than if they had tied things together with AD. It means more work - but thats what it takes, unless you want your firm to get owned.

Re:No.

[Rich0]

I dunno - why do the desktops need all the enterprise-y features, and what makes the tablets different? I can't think of any reason why there would be a reason to differentiate them.

Re:No.

[h4rr4r]

Actually it would make a lot of sense, if they added the needed GPOs. Automatically configuring the http proxy would be nice, as would being able to use the domain login for authentication. You could also use it to lockdown all kinds of things, or just use it to set defaults.

Re:No.

[squiggleslash]

Notebooks and laptops are portable computing devices, but predate the Internet in concept, and are designed to be used standalone. The reason someone is given a notebook is typically so that they can work offline. A salesperson can go to a client and show a Powerpoint presentation. A software developer can go home and hack on their project. In that context, where connectivity is optional, the concept of using a million hacks to connect to the office network isn't that bizarre. It wasn't that long ago that "going online" when on the road meant using a modem.

Tablets? No. That's not how they're going. Tablets are, right now, running the same operating systems that mobile phones run. They expect to be online, all the time. A quick look at Windows 8 (which I've used and was moderately impressed by) shows an OS that, by default, is set up as an online operating system, one that's going to be very weird and clunky without a network connection.

I understand where you're coming from, but it's not quite the same. It's about expectations, it's about how seamlessly the system integrates with the hacks upon hacks we've been using for decades.

I've been thinking a lot lately about how to get my tablets to connect to my home network. In theory, they have the capabilities, and all I have to do is run the VPN server at home. And from time to time I've implemented it, and it's been - to say the least - very ugly when I've tried. Some of that is Android's fault, but some of it is merely Android trying to do the right thing, trying to avoid being online when, for example, the device isn't in use, to save battery power. It doesn't feel right. It's probably never going to feel right. And until we quit it with the ugly hacks, and go for IPv6 + IPSEC everywhere, I don't see this being resolved any time soon.

Re:No.

[Eponymous Coward]

The surprise for me was that they could even consider releasing their tablet computer as it was. I believe that hurt them a lot.

Re:No.

[swissmonkey]

And what enterprise you think will buy non-x86/amd64 tablets ? There's no enterprise software for them and there won't be for a few years at least. The iPad has barely any itself.

MS will arrive with Win8 tablets that can run existing entreprise software, that can join domains : the x86/amd64 versions.

There's no point in having those features on the ARM port because there's simply no software to take advantage of it and there won't be for a significant time.

Re:No.

[swissmonkey]

If you do a poll on Windows 8 and the new Metro interface, you'll actually find that the majority is positive. It's obviously not 100%, but it's more than 50%. People are actually excited about Win8 coming.

So you might want to get a larger sampling than the people who tried it in your shop.

Re:No.

[ewok85]

I've worked for a number of Fortune 100 companies in the last 3 years and iPad "adoption" is generally little more than email, and even then its only because it is everyone's favourite new toy.

Re:No.

[hairyfeet]

Except you then do follow ups on the poll and you'll find a LARGE amount of the positives had touch screen interfaces, be it tablets or touch screen monitors. but how many of the PCs being sold today actually HAVE a touch screen interface? last numbers I saw had it at less than 4%, and if you remove POS and kiosks that number quickly drops to less than 1%.

So you have an OS that is designed to be its most effective with an interface that is on less than 1% of units sold, and MSFT is deluding themselves if they think in such a cutthroat market, where Dell and HP make on average $8 on their low end units (which are the biggest sellers BTW) that these companies are gonna eat the cost of a touch screen and the consumer sure as hell isn't gonna buy a touch screen when a 17 inch 1366x768 touch screen cost $300 and a 24 inch 1080p costs less than $150.

You may be right on the mobile front, maybe they can scratch out a niche. but watching users on desktops and non touch screen laptops what i found was this is pretty typical and nothing frustrates a user more than feeling lost. Frankly if they don't boost the living hell out of the tutorials and tooltips I can easily see it bombing hard on desktops and laptops which is MSFT's bread and butter. All I know is i have a ton of customers already that have already said they won't be going to Win 8 PERIOD, with many going so far as to buy future proof units so they can skip it entirely. Frankly I didn't even see that kind of backlash with Vista as many were curious and honestly excited...until they ran into a bug that bit them in the ass. But selling this OS without MUCH more and deeper instruction is a mistake IMHO but we'll see who is right come Jan 2013.

Re:No.

[crutchy]

sore loser

microsoft-bashing on dotslash is fun, and if someone makes a profit out of it, good for them

if you were making a profit from slashdot hits, would you complain about your own ethics?
think not

jealousy is bad too

Re:No.

[crutchy]

MSFT

are you a microsoft shareholder by any chance?
...given that "MSFT" is its NASDAQ code

otherwise, you have my sympathy for your apparent brain damage

Re:No.

[jonadab]

Interesting.

Being a network administrator, I'm not sure I have any sympathy for the people who feel like they have to pay for those upgrades. Upgrades to commercial software cost money. When you plan your network infrastructure around a commercial operating system, you'd better plan to spend money on upgrades. It WILL be necessary. (If you're trying to avoid spending any money on software upgrades, you could always use Debian, or one of the various other options.)

Password hash salting is an important security feature. If you're using an old OS that doesn't support it, upgrading to one that does is important. It's worth the money -- assuming the network operating system you're using was worth the money in the first place, which I suppose depends mostly on whether you have mission-critical third-party line-of-business software that requires it. That seems to be the usual reason for running Windows on servers (I can't think of any OTHER reason to do so), and said third-party software typically has annual maintenance fees that make a couple of Windows licenses look like pocket change, so you should be able to afford the OS upgrade in that case. Factor the Windows upgrades into the budget as part of the cost of running the line-of-business software that requires Windows. In a very real way it *is* part of the cost of doing that.

Re:No.

[Trilkin]

Yeah, I read about that. I don't have access to a R2 environment so I haven't actually utilized it, but it's definitely a good step forward, if a bit... useless at the moment.

It does support enterprise

[shutdown -p now]

WinRT does have central administration capabilities, just not as extensive as enterprise editions of Windows.

Re:It does support enterprise

[MatthiasF]

I agree, it does have some administration capabilities, but Microsoft probably left out the heavy hitting stuff because they expect the OS to be owned by consumers and not coworkers.

So, Microsoft had to keep the standard features on the home-user side of the line, otherwise enterprise features would allow a personal tablet or phone to be commandeered by their company's IT staff.

And I agree with them, they should keep the two separate or at least make sure the two are well defined in the OS so one can't harm the other.

Re:It does support enterprise

[hobarrera]

Yeah, basically if you want to run a web or sql server on it or treat it as a desktop, you're SOL.

If you're tring to run either of those on a tablet you're dumb.

Re:It does support enterprise

[im_thatoneguy]

The real question is: why would you want an ARM powered Windows Tablet anyway? With Medfield http://www.anandtech.com/show/5365/intels-medfield-atom-z2460-arrive-for-smartphones/1 we're already seeing x86 not only competitive but actually besting some ARM devices for performance and battery life.

Corporations are going to want backwards compatibility in applications and other x86 capabilities. If corporations need the full group policies and enterprise features they can just buy a full copy of Windows 8 Enterprise.

If I was a corporate IT department I would prefer to support a single Windows version instead of trying to stay on top of both x86 and ARM updates and glitches.

Re:It does support enterprise

[spire3661]

If you have no vision as to why these features might be useful in a portable and powerful machine then you are a fool. Right tool for the right job.

I love taking my rooted 32 GB nook color tablet with a samba server to my linux class and turning it on for my classmates to connect to during the 4 hour class. I just serve small books, utilities etc, but its nice to have.

Not everything needs to go through the internet when you can carry small, relevant bubbles of it with you. Stop thinking of tablets of these dumb terminals, thats retarded (no pun). They push and pull, can local process, all kinds of funky computing fun on the go and its all backed up by the biggest iron the planet has ever seen and its only going to get bigger!. Widen the scope of what you think tablets should be.

Re:It does support enterprise

[Billly Gates]

Sure why not?

If your just learning to code. Obviously its not a real server with real server hardware. Then you run an enterprise OS like Windows Server with real server hardware.

Re:It does support enterprise

[Anonymous Coward]

That article doesn't tell us much about power/performance ratio.

The performance benchmarks show better on Medfield but power usage at for those benchmarks is not shown.

The power usage benchmarks were provided by intel without detail on how to reproduce the results (e.g. did they turn the clock speed way down??). Anandtech was not able to reproduce the power usage results.

Re:It does support enterprise

[19thNervousBreakdown]

Wait wait wait, WinRT is completely different from Windows RT. The first is an API (which has nothing to do with "realtime", although they probably have some of that in there to be extra confusing), the second is an operating system that runs on ARM processors and is not a realtime OS. It does implement WinRT though, maybe that's why they named it that. Except Windows 8 implements WinRT too.

The whole thing is so stupidly confusing, there has got to be some motivation behind it, although I can't for the life of me figure out what it would be. It's not like they're going to get people to buy the wrong OS and then spend more to buy the right OS--that's just an invitation to get sued if they try to mislead and double-charge like that. But why? It's bad enough when two things that are completely unrelated are named confusingly, but one thing that implements another? It's insane!

Re:It does support enterprise

[shutdown -p now]

If you wanted to do these kinds of things on a tablet, why'd you choose an underpowered ARM device? The sole point of ARM is to give better battery life, but if you're running a web and SQL server on it, well...

Re:It does support enterprise

[shutdown -p now]

I don't know what's up with branding, but the API is not really WinRT - it's "Windows Runtime" (that's how it goes on MSDN); "WinRT" is just a shortened version of that. The OS, on the other hand, is "Windows RT". It's confusing, I agree.

Re:It does support enterprise

[Mabhatter]

I'd argue that plenty of people are buying NEW apps for iPads (that didnt exist three years ago) at a record setting pace. The king of the hill is Citrix and they already have a client out for iPad... That means any native apps you need are already covered. For a standard "sales monkey" business traveler, iPad is nearly enough. iPad even supports remote wiping when paired to a windows exchange.

Microsoft should have moved their core apps to pure managed .Net years ago. Then Windows RT would have been their big shift.. Just like Apple Switched all it's apps to Intel in just 18 months. Really, a new OS is. The BEST time to rip that backward compatability patch right off. .Net /Silverlight was the vehicle to do that with... It's easy to add that to existing PCs but start with a clean slate. They could even have the apps run on XBox 360 and for sure the NEXT "Xbox".

Just like Windows 7, people are waiting around to see what Microsoft will do. they are just handing the plate to Apple and google if this is the case.

Re:It does support enterprise

[oiron]

Well, the first machine I ran mysql on was significantly less powerful than the phone that's charging to my right...

Why not? Not necessarily for running an entire enterprise web stack, but...

Re:It does support enterprise

[19thNervousBreakdown]

Oh, they call Windows Runtime WinRT all over the place. Just to confuse you even more, there's two names for one thing, both of which are easily confused as being a different way to say yet other things.

Re:It does support enterprise

[shutdown -p now]

Microsoft should have moved their core apps to pure managed .Net years ago. Then Windows RT would have been their big shift.. Just like Apple Switched all it's apps to Intel in just 18 months. Really, a new OS is. The BEST time to rip that backward compatability patch right off. .Net /Silverlight was the vehicle to do that with...

Windows RT does rip backwards compatibility - it doesn't run any existing Win32 apps other than a few preselected ones from MS. The vehicle for the new stuff is not .NET/Silverlight, though, but rather Windows Runtime (which is, roughly speaking, Silverlight ported to and accessible from native code - in addition to managed).

It's easy to add that to existing PCs but start with a clean slate.

That's exactly how it works. Win8 on Intel has all the old APIs fully supported, but then it also adds Metro and WinRT. Win8 on ARM only has WinRT.

Re:It does support enterprise

[hobarrera]

You said samba. GP said a webserver os SQL server. There's a big difference really.
While I can see why file-sharing might be helpfull (I use sshfs on my cell phone as well), I don't see any point in running a full blown SQL server/web server.

There are really no use-case scenarios where this is useful.

As for "the right tool for the right job", a 1TB network-able portable hard disk might be the same weight, and a better file-server (you certainly won't need to deal with samba), plus, it's larger, and it's sane to use it for R/W. In turn, your're using a device call "ebook reader" to "store and serve file". Sounds like you need network-capable portable storage IMO.

A matter of priorities

[Anonymous Coward]

I guess someone thought a locked boot-loader and mandatory chain of trust that begins and ends at MS was more important than a solid set of working features.

Could've saved us all some time

[wonkey_monkey]

...and put this part in bold so I'd have known not to bother reading the rest of TFS:

This is pure speculation on my part

Re:RT?

[game kid]

Woah...

WOA

[88NoSoup4U88]

I can't help myself but see Keanu Reeves as Ted saying "woaaa".

Re:WOA

[RyuuzakiTetsuya]

Sure beats their other potential name for it, Windows "I-Know-Kung-Fu!"

Re:It's a huge undertaking

[sandytaru]

And there's nothing to say they can't add those capabilities in a patch later down the road if enough people complain.

The insane insistence on "Windows"

[UnknowingFool]

I have to disagree that Microsoft ran out of time. They just have an insane insistence that everything must but "Windows" even the Windows model doesn't fit. For style of tablets that compete with the iPad, they don't have to be desktops like Windows or OS X. Yet MS felt that they needed to spend development to shove the tablet model into Windows and label it as Windows 8. If MS focused on creating a new OS just for the tablet, they might have worked out all the enterprise features instead.

To clarify the article, Windows programs will run on Windows RT and Windows 8 but only if written specifically that way. Legacy programs are important to the vast majority of enterprises and are not compatible with Windows RT. So Windows RT was never going to be legacy compatible, why do they need to rewrite the desktop Windows model just to call it all "Windows".

The best use case I can see for Windows 8 hybrid approach is unfortunately something that MS has done in the past but never worked out. Hybrid tablet/laptops would have been great for Windows 8. But there is nothing on the horizon that remotely fits this vision. Intel is pushing for ultrabooks favoring less weight and more power efficiency instead of multi-touch transformable tablets. Seems like MS designed an OS for hardware that doesn't exist and even if it did is a very small percentage of users instead of optimizing for the hardware that is in the near future.

Re:The insane insistence on "Windows"

[Anonymous Coward]

They would be crucified by the dev community if they reworked the whole win32 stack. At first wince had the same promise but we quickly figured out that it wasnt 'really' win32. We ditched it quick.

Its the api stack we want. We have spent 20 years learning it...

What you are thinking about is the GUI. They are trying that too. But you know what? It sucks. When you go from a device you can 100% control to one where you sorta control it and sorta know what is going on people will ignore it...

Re:The insane insistence on "Windows"

[recoiledsnake]

Hybrid tablet/laptops would have been great for Windows 8. But there is nothing on the horizon that remotely fits this vision. Intel is pushing for ultrabooks favoring less weight and more power efficiency instead of multi-touch transformable tablets. Seems like MS designed an OS for hardware that doesn't exist and even if it did is a very small percentage of users instead of optimizing for the hardware that is in the near future.

Have you been living under a rock?

Have you checked out the Ideapad Yoga with 10 multitouch points? http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZIGUwyAXpgQ

And the news that around 32 touch models will debut this year with Windows 8? http://www.informationweek.com/news/hardware/handheld/232900536

More: http://www.wired.com/gadgetlab/2012/04/intel-cove-point-ultrabook-tablet-hybrid-running-windows-8/

http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9226083/Intel_working_with_10_vendors_on_Windows_8_tablets?taxonomyId=12

I think the reason you think the hardware doesn't exist is that they're keeping it under wraps so that they don't cannibalize existing sales now, which makes sense really.

Re:The insane insistence on "Windows"

[im_thatoneguy]

The largest advantage of a Windows Tablet is that everything just works. You can run Starcraft if you feel like it. You can run not some butchered Google Docs or HTML5 version of office but the real application. You can run the real version of flash, silverlight and everything else if you really really need to. You can fail-back to a normal desktop experience if needed.

I have an Android Tablet and it is incredibly frustrating to constantly run into limitations and gaps in the software and OS. For instance the other day I just really wanted to send a link to a friend on facebook messenger. I didn't have the Facebook App installed so I figured I would just fire up Opera. Much profanity later I finally got the message out but even with awkward finger interfaces in Windows I would have been able to send it much more quickly. There is a popular web forum I read that doesn't have an app. I was trying to write a comment but their javascript WYSIWYG comment window wasn't registering my typing correctly. It's that kind of incompatibility that just-works on a PC that no tablets offer yet.

What will differentiate Windows 8 from Android and the iPad is that it's a full blown honest to God OS for when you really really need the real honest to god versions of applications. If you want to see what your idea of Windows 8 would have looked like in the market look at WP7. Microsoft knocked it out of the park according to the consensus of reviewers but it just isn't different enough to convince people to use it. If Microsoft tried to offer an OS specifically written for tablets then it would probably make 3% of the market and offer nothing of interest. Microsoft did the right thing. They are offering something very unique, the full windows experience and app compatibility but also with a mode which is friendly to touch. But they took it a step further and ensured "if you buy Photoshop for your tablet you also get photoshop for your PC and if you buy angry birds for your tablet you also get it for your PC." I assume the next step will be 'if you buy angry birds for your PC you also buy it for your tablet and phone.'

I used to use an Android phone and it's obnoxious that I have to repurchase all of my apps for my new phone OS and that I can't play them on my Xbox or PC. Microsoft and Apple are both in the near future fighting to offer the "Buy once, run anywhere" model of applications. If you had to buy separate applications for your laptop and your desktop there would be a revolt.

I don't think Microsoft ran out of time. I think Microsoft just doesn't care about WindowsRT. x86 and ARM are going to performance and battery life parity by the time Windows8 Launches. Microsoft is going to go "Look you can buy a WinRT computer with no backwards compatibility that only runs new apps or you can buy Windows 8 and get all of your old applications and the new ones. Which do you want? The hardware is the same in performance and battery life." People are going to choose x86 because once again ARM just can't stand up to the unstoppable juggernaut that is Intel's foundry and development arms. And in 12 months when Microsoft quietly kills their ARM fork they're going to say "See you asked for ARM and we ensured it ran on ARM but the market has spoken and Intel won out again."

Re:The insane insistence on "Windows"

[0123456]

The largest advantage of a Windows Tablet is that everything just works. You can run Starcraft if you feel like it. You can run not some butchered Google Docs or HTML5 version of office but the real application. You can run the real version of flash, silverlight and everything else if you really really need to.

But, um, that's rather the point. The tablet claims to be 'Windows', but you can't do any of those things.

All you'll be able to run are ARM apps, Metro apps and the limited subset of .Net apps that can run on ARM. If you try to run some random Windows program on your tablet, you'll probably find it won't run.

Re:The insane insistence on "Windows"

[im_thatoneguy]

You're taking my statement out of context and making it in response to something other than the OP.

The OP said that it was a mistake for Microsoft to force its TabletOS to be "Windows" and should have simply pursued a "Windows-Tablet".

My point was that the ARM Tablet market running on a "tablet-OS" is already over-saturated and deficient in many areas that are important to customers.

I went on to say that my prediction is that the ARM branch of Windows 8 will not be very successful and will be killed in the not too distant future. The only reason Microsoft released an ARM version of Windows 8 was to offer the argument that if you like ARM and think ARM is faster you can get as good of an experience as you're getting with an iPad today (but with cross platform application support in Metro Apps) so you have no excuse. I also suspect it's an effort to bring its existing WP7 ecosystem into the Windows8 Kernel fold.

Windows 8 RT as a tablet OS is kind of the bastard step child designed for those who don't care about backwards compatibility. Windows 8 x86 is going to be just as fast and battery efficient but most likely cost a small premium in the short term.

And going forward it will run all of the same applications so if you were to buy a Windows RT Tablet you could later switch to Windows 8 without any penalty or loss of data/applications.

Re:The insane insistence on "Windows"

[arkhan_jg]

Yet MS felt that they needed to spend development to shove the tablet model into Windows and label it as Windows 8. If MS focused on creating a new OS just for the tablet, they might have worked out all the enterprise features instead.

The problem for them doing that is that they'd be a third entrant to the market, with an even more dominant leader - the iPad - to beat than they face in the smartphone market. And we've all seen how that's working out for them. Their biggest problem is the lack of killer apps. Well, that and the memory of the stinker windows mobile 6.5. And they're bleeding users to macbook airs, ipads, iphones, and android phones. The fat desktop is in slow decline, and more and more people are realising they don't need office, or even a PC.

They don't have time for windows tablet to hang around in the market for a couple of years, and only pick up a single digit userbase. Not unless they want to continue their slide into irrelevence.

So windows 8 is a bold/suicidal move. They're working on the basis that by using their many millions of current desktop users as a trojan horse to get the windows app store - and metro apps - out there very widely, they'll attract developers to metro, and get some real killer apps which will then give people a reason to actually WANT a windows 8 tablet or phone. That windows 8 sucks pretty hard for desktop users doesn't really matter, as they'll buy whatever comes pre-installed on their OEM computer, and as long as it runs their current apps, they'll live with it.

The ipad and iphone is demonstrating that IT isn't in charge of corporate devices any more. Management bring whatever random consumer shit in they like, and it's IT problem to change the network to make it work like 'it does at home'. And once the managers have them, they're 'cheap' to get for workers too, instead of desktop upgrades. Only nerds care about feature lists any more, it's ease of use and shiny shiny that's all important now.

Microsoft can see the writing on the wall, and are desparate to get metro out as far as possible, as wide as possible, in the hope that that will stem the tide and keep them relevant 5 years from now. It's gutsy, I've gotta give them that.

Re:The insane insistence on "Windows"

[UnknowingFool]

Most of the hardware you describe doesn't exist except for the Yoga which is Intel not ARM. Windows RT is for ARM.

And the news that around 32 touch models will debut this year with Windows 8?

32 touch tablet are expected, but they are not hybrids that I was talking about. Also when the iPad was released, CES 2010 was full of Windows tablets that were going to launch in the same year. Except for the HP Slate, what happened to them?

Intel's Cove Point was shown off by Intel as a prototype not by an OEM.

Currently, no OEMs have made a Cove Point announcement, but we would be surprised if manufacturers ignored the ultrabook-hybrid form factor entirely.

First Cove Point uses an Intel chip not ARM and second, no word on if this will be made by an OEM.

http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9226083/Intel_working_with_10_vendors_on_Windows_8_tablets?taxonomyId=12 [computerworld.com]

Again, I never said anything Windows 8 Tablets not coming out. I said the best use case was a tablet/laptop hybrid. This store only points to Windows 8 Tablets.

I think the reason you think the hardware doesn't exist is that they're keeping it under wraps so that they don't cannibalize existing sales now, which makes sense really.

Existing sales of what? Windows 7 tablets? They are not exactly flying off the shelves. For MS' part, they haven't kept anything under wraps so existing enterprise customers needing to decide on Windows 8 or Windows 7 pretty much have most of the information.

Re:The insane insistence on "Windows"

[UnknowingFool]

The largest advantage of a Windows Tablet is that everything just works. You can run Starcraft if you feel like it.

So you're saying that Starcraft will run on Windows RT? MS specifically says this will not happen unless Blizzard goes back and rewrites it using .NET. This applies to all legacy x86 software. If Windows RT does not have the advantage of running legacy apps why did they need to make Windows desktop fit RT? A consumer seeing Windows 8 on desktop will only be more confused that their legacy apps will not run on their tablet as not only do they are "Windows" but also the metro UI is the same.

Re:The insane insistence on "Windows"

[symbolset]

These obvious advantages haven't amounted to a successful Windows tablet for the last 17 years, when they've been available and not sold well the whole time. What makes this new one different?

Re:The insane insistence on "Windows"

[assassinator42]

You won't be able to run any non-Metro apps not written by Microsoft.
Apparently they won't even let you run command line .NET apps that aren't tied to any specific architecture.

Re:The insane insistence on "Windows"

[recoiledsnake]

>Most of the hardware you describe doesn't exist except for the Yoga which is Intel not ARM. Windows RT is for ARM.

Your OP said, "nothing on the horizon" and now it's switched to something that "exists"?

So you want an ARM tablet/laptop hybrid and x86 ones don't qualify the requirement?

I think ASUS is going to come out with one of those, but they're of limited utility since only Office(comes bundled) will run the desktop and no existing Win32 apps.

Re:The insane insistence on "Windows"

[UnknowingFool]

The Windows 8 hybrid approach would work great for hybrid tablet/laptops. Nothing in the articles you mentioned about Windows 8 tablets suggested they were hybrid. They would only describe them as touch tablets with some of them ARM and some x86. The CovePoint is great as a proof of concept and Ideapad Yoga would be great for this if they actually released it. But my memory of previous CES (especially 2010) says not everything that is announced is released. But that is just one OEM releasing the hybrid I specified. One.

Re:The insane insistence on "Windows"

[UnknowingFool]

The thing with Metro is that it is a UI not a platform. I thought one of the worst things that MS did with WindowsMobile was to make it look like Windows desktop. There was no need as the APIs were completely different. They are making the same mistake but in reverse, making desktop adhere to a UI designed for mobile devices. I don't know about the future plans of smartphones but are they going to be Windows 8 for phone in the future and how compatible will it be with existing platforms. If it is not compatible with WP7 apps then that's another negative for WP7. So far I've heard rumors that this is the direction but MS will not confirm it as it would kill WP7 sales.

Re:The insane insistence on "Windows"

[im_thatoneguy]

These obvious advantages haven't amounted to a successful Windows tablet for the last 17 years, when they've been available and not sold well the whole time. What makes this new one different?

Speaking as a Niche Windows Tablet owner I can actually say with a high degree of confidence why I own a Windows Tablet and an Android Tablet.

1) Battery life. Until now Windows tablets get about 3 hours of battery life. If you are on a long flight and spend an hour or two in an airport your battery is dead mid-flight.

2) Weight. Until now Windows tablets weight a metric ton and are treated like laptops not tablets.

3) Performance. With a processor small enough to avoid #1 and #2 windows is too slow to run even basic apps. (I even had a Samsung Q1 ultra for a while but it was just too slow even for web browsing and I returned it.)

4) No touch apps. Windows is actually already pretty touch friendly. But none of its apps are. Microsoft has been pushing a Mouse and Keyboard OS and hoping people would just happen to make their applications touch/pen friendly. But it doesn't matter how usable Windows is if an application has a 10px wide button in its UI. Windows can't force interfaces to be touch friendly nor should it be. With Windows 8 though Metro is making a concerted effort to offer a venue and market for touch friendly applications for Windows. Microsoft has to show developers that they're super double dog serious about people using their windows PCs as tablets.

I think Windows 8 is coinciding with the important convergence of Affordable large capacitive touch displays, long lasting small batteries and extremely power efficient x86 processors.

I've always said that the iPhone succeeded not because of the OS but because of affordable capacitive not resistive touch displays, a drop in mobile bandwidth prices and improved batteries more than anything else. Everybody mocked Windows Phone 6 for not being finger friendly but if you tried actually using a Resistive touch screen with your finger (which was all that was available to OEMs) then you would understand immediately why fingers were not at the forefront of UI design.

Same thing is happening with Windows 8. x86 has gotten to the point now where we can already have a smoking fast Windows machine with 7.5 hours of battery life, great performance and weigh less than 3 lbs while remaining affordable. http://www.engadget.com/2012/04/09/15-inch-samsung-series-9-review-2012/

Intel has posted the specs for their slate tablets and they're 9+ hours of battery life 9mm thick and 1.5lbs in weight. That's a Asus Transformer Prime or Samsung Galaxy Tab 2.

So the answer is that for the last 17 years Windows hasn't had the hardware it needs to succeed. But people are expect less out of their apps (My old Windows XP box is 'good enough'!) and hardware is getting smaller and cheaper.

ARM will probably have the price advantage in the near term still but Intel is closing the gap fast. Windows 8 is just in the right place at the right time.

Re:The insane insistence on "Windows"

[im_thatoneguy]

So you're saying that Starcraft will run on Windows RT?

No. I'm saying that Windows RT is irrelevant for the same reason that iPad and Android are similarly irellevant: it can't run Starcraft*. (*Starcraft obviously being a token application. Insert your favorite application here.)

Microsoft is smart enough to know that "Another good tablet OS" isn't enough to take over the market. What is good enough is an OS which offers something that Android and iPad don't have which is a massive back catalogue and capability to fall back on real applications when there is no lightweight app equivalent.

Think about all the hacking people do to run Hulu without an App. Windows 8 x86 is a PC therefore you won't be able to discriminate against a touchscreen PC vs a desktop PC. No more hacking to get Hulu to work.

You said:

MS felt that they needed to spend development to shove the tablet model into Windows and label it as Windows 8. If MS focused on creating a new OS just for the tablet, they might have worked out all the enterprise features instead.

This is precisely my point. Windows 8 x86 on a tablet is unique in that it offers legacy applications. If Microsoft had just released Windows RT they wouldn't have this feature. And if you just want a cheap ARM tablet and have no need for legacy apps they've got you covered there *as well* and when you realize that you do want a real PC you can buy an x86 tablet and still use all of your old Metro Apps from your ARM tablet.

That's why I'm saying that it's a good idea to "shove a tablet into windows" since the x86 PCs will offer both a PC and a Tablet in one. Why buy a Macbook Air and an iPad when you can buy a Windows 8 slate and pop on a keyboard/trackpad case when you need to use the full windows experience?

I'm so fed up with all the limitations of my Android Tablet that I can't wait to run a full windows OS which also has a nice front end for consumption and lightweight apps.

Re:The insane insistence on "Windows"

[im_thatoneguy]

They are making the same mistake but in reverse, making desktop adhere to a UI designed for mobile devices.

Except that they aren't. They left the desktop intact. If you want to run Micro-Pixel-Buttons the Power-App you'll continue running it exactly as you do today.

If you want a lightweight finger friendly app then you use Metro. Nobody is being forced to adhere to Metro on the desktop. The desktop is continuing on exactly as it was and has been.

You seem to believe that the desktop is dead. It's not. It's exactly where it's always been. Nothing is getting shoehorned into something else. You have a desktop (and god help you if you want to use your fingers but it's there anyway.) and you have apps which are finger friendly. Why can't the two co-exist?

Re:The insane insistence on "Windows"

[ulricr]

but they did rework the whole win32 stack, and apps won't simply work on Arm by recompiling. only metro apps will be accepted in the AppStore, afaik, and that's the only way to install apps on arm

Re:The insane insistence on "Windows"

[subreality]

Starcraft won't run on ARM, Windows or not. As for the rest, why are you running Android when you clearly need Ubuntu?

Re:The insane insistence on "Windows"

[Bert64]

You make a good point, their insistence on "windows everywhere" is extremely counter productive... I assume they hope that the familiar brand will promote sales, but the reality is generally quite the opposite.

Windows is well known as a desktop os, it is also widely associated with crashing and malware. People tolerate this on their desktop because, thanks to marketing, they think the alternatives are either to complicated for them, much more expensive or don't exist at all.
On phones and tablets however, the alternatives are well established so people aren't willing to take a step down.

I know several people who have refused to try windows phone simply because its branded as windows... They either don't want the malware problems from their pc crossing over to their phone (not even true, just perception based on the brand association), or they have a bad taste in their mouth having used windows mobile.

Then there is the market fragmentation aspect, if people buy a device advertised as "windows" they will expect it to run all their existing apps... I have seen people buy really cheap laptops with windows ce, and phones with windows mobile expecting them to run the same apps as x86 windows. People have even chosen the windows ce laptops over linux based ones for this reason, only they end up sorely disappointed and feel conned.

On the other hand, look at the xbox... it's not branded as windows and doesn't try to use the windows interface etc, and it's been pretty successful. People perceive it as its own product, and take it on its own merits.

Re:The insane insistence on "Windows"

[symbolset]

Y'know what? You have the right stuff in your bag mostly. And I'm going to beat you with it mercilessly it anyway. That's not fair, really, but that's how it is. Thanks for the list.

Re:The insane insistence on "Windows"

[Tough Love]

x86 and ARM are going to performance and battery life parity by the time Windows8 Launches

Maybe, but not cost parity. Intel would die if it had to sell high performing chips at the price ARM vendors charge.

Re:The insane insistence on "Windows"

[sonicmerlin]

It's not even fair to Intel's competitors is it? Intel's so far ahead of everyone else at 22 nm, and will be moving their mobile chips to their latest and smallest process. It's rather unfortunate... I don't think anyone wants to see an Intel monopoly.

On the other hand in the short term we'll still need to see how good Medfield is. IIRC per core Linpack scores are lower than Cortex A15. And Intel's biggest issue is latency of sleep mode, which has historically been nowhere near as good as ARM hardware.

Re:The insane insistence on "Windows"

[sonicmerlin]

Well the Intel tablets aren't going to be very powerful. ARM Cortex A9 is equivalent to Pentium 3, and A15 to Pentium 4. Medfield slots somewhere inbetween those two.

Re:The insane insistence on "Windows"

[shutdown -p now]

Hybrid tablet/laptops would have been great for Windows 8. But there is nothing on the horizon that remotely fits this vision.

Asus has already said that they'll be making a Transformer-like device running Win8. If they make an Intel-based version (Medfied), that might well be that holy grail.

And you can bet that others that have been probing in that niche already, like Lenovo with their Thinkpad tablet, will also have Win8 versions of their devices - at least the ARM ones.

Re:The insane insistence on "Windows"

[shutdown -p now]

Also when the iPad was released, CES 2010 was full of Windows tablets that were going to launch in the same year. Except for the HP Slate, what happened to them?

Marketing suddenly realized that Win7 UI is not going to win a competition with iPad just because you put it on touch-based hardware?

Re:The insane insistence on "Windows"

[UnknowingFool]

No. I'm saying that Windows RT is irrelevant for the same reason that iPad and Android are similarly irellevant: it can't run Starcraft*. (*Starcraft obviously being a token application. Insert your favorite application here.)

So what you're saying Windows RT is a waste of time then? Why did MS waste time to develop a version just for ARM tablets?

This is precisely my point. Windows 8 x86 on a tablet is unique in that it offers legacy applications. . . . That's why I'm saying that it's a good idea to "shove a tablet into windows" since the x86 PCs will offer both a PC and a Tablet in one. Why buy a Macbook Air and an iPad when you can buy a Windows 8 slate and pop on a keyboard/trackpad case when you need to use the full windows experience?

Only for x86 hybrid tablets/laptops. For desktops/laptop without touch, metro UI is basically useless. For tablets without a keyboard, legacy apps will be hard to use with only touch.

Re:The insane insistence on "Windows"

[UnknowingFool]

Have you used the desktop in Window 8? MS had made it not the default and put Metro at forefront even though the vast majority of desktops are not touch. People still need desktops and if MS made Metro an option instead of default, it would have been much easier to use.

Re:The insane insistence on "Windows"

[Lonewolf666]

Microsoft is smart enough to know that "Another good tablet OS" isn't enough to take over the market. What is good enough is an OS which offers something that Android and iPad don't have which is a massive back catalogue and capability to fall back on real applications when there is no lightweight app equivalent.

Moving to a touchscreen interface without adapting the GUI is not going to work well. And the legacy apps will not adapt themselves.

I've recently (most of 2011) worked on creating a tablet application that is running on Windows7. Initially, we tried to go with legacy-style (normal size) controls. It soon turned out that using a finger on the touchscreen, most users would hit the wrong controls much of the time. Simply because the accuracy was way inferior to using a mouse. Using a stylus was somewhat better, but not fully satisfying either.

Our GUI guy ended up reprogramming things like edit boxes and checkboxes in double size. After that, the usability of the application was OK. Before, it was a usability nightmare, which most legacy apps will be too if moved to a tablet without changing the GUI.
 

Re:The insane insistence on "Windows"

[Bongo]

I've always said that the iPhone succeeded not because of the OS but because of affordable capacitive not resistive touch displays, a drop in mobile bandwidth prices and improved batteries more than anything else. [...] Windows 8 is just in the right place at the right time.

I agree about timing. I wonder whether Apple would have released the iPad any sooner, or whether their product intelligence said, there's no point until it is X weight and gives Y hours. Arguably, Apple was just at the right place at the right time. They figured you didn't need a "full Mac OS X" experience, the product would still sell as an iDevice. And touch meant apps need to be made for touch, with new UIs, so again, they figured, no point unless the app is made for touch.

What seems in the air now is whether anybody cares anymore to stick with Windows brand. A touch UI means you lose your old apps anyway. Don't just think of all the things you can do on a PC that you can't do on a tablet, but think of all the things people do on a tablet that they wouldn't do on a PC.

The whole point of ubiquitous computing is that you have a whole bunch of devices. One way or the other it is a post-PC world. Windows tablets can still sell, just like Android sells, and Apple sells. I can't imagine anyone dominating everything. Different markets will probably end up picking different ecosystems. Doctors will be buying Apple, accountants Windows, architects Windows and Apple, sales will be buying Androids, etc. etc. The IT people will do the usual jumps to try to make things run smoothly. Home shopper grannies will be using Kindles, and in the rest of the world, other brands will appear. Those that can't get any traction anywhere will fade. It'll be driven by apps, and apps will drive the adoption. If architects want an A3 sized tablet and the only niche available is a Windows one running some custom touch AutoCAD app, they'll be driven to adopt Windows ecosystem on tablets. But just in that market. It is all about the apps. But nobody will get too excited about any of this. If anything it'll mean even more compatibility headaches. Nobody will dominate, not even Google or "open".

Re:The insane insistence on "Windows"

[Bert64]

Exactly, among the average joe Windows is associated with computers (even if they don't actually what it is and how it associates), and computers are commonly known as unreliable, prone to crashing and being infected with viruses. People don't want a phone that works like a computer.

Re:The insane insistence on "Windows"

[im_thatoneguy]

Hard is better than impossible.

Windows will have Metro finger friendly apps. But instead of be SOL when you can't get one to work you can always resort to awkwardly using your tablet.

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:It's a huge undertaking

[MightyMartian]

But the underling OS is portable and has been for 20 years. All the enterprise functionality is user land, written in c or c++ so should be trivial to recompile to ARM.

Re:They ran out of time years ago

[0123456]

I saw someone using an iPad only three weeks ago. I saw another one last year.

I know... Apple ran out of time too!

[crath]

Saying that MS ran out of time is like saying that the iPad's missing enterprise features are because Apple ran out of time. The iPad's adoption is about user experience, not making CIO's lives happier.

Re:I know... Apple ran out of time too!

[gstrickler]

Saying that MS ran out of time is like saying that the iPad's missing enterprise features are because Apple ran out of time.

If Apple had a huge installed base in enterprises, with the types of centralized management features Windows AD/GPO offers, then your point would be valid. However, Apple basically didn't have such an installed base, nor did they offer such centralized management features. Theerfore, they didn't have that legacy expectation to fulfill. And almost as important, they didn't have any established competition in the iPad market, it was a new category of product, that happened to have >200k apps available at launch by virtue of the iPhone market.

The iPhone itself had most of the same things going for it at launch, except for that Blackberry and WinMo devices were established competitors. There were some enterprise features developed for the iPhone (Exchange connectivity, third party management tools, etc.), and the iPad had those same capabilities at launch.

The iPad's adoption is about user experience, not making CIO's lives happier.

Correct. But it's being adopted in enterprises because it provides capabilities that haven't been viable before, not just because user's want it.

Re:I know... Apple ran out of time too!

[symbolset]

It's hard to criticize the iPad. They are making them as fast as they can and selling every one at huge margin. It's just impossible under that condition to make a compelling argument that the product is missing something it really needs. You can't sell more than "all of them".

FTFY

[hobarrera]

'I think you can take Windows RT off the table.'

FTFY

But the iPad can't either!

[wjsteele]

The fact that the Win RT based devices can't join a domain doesn't matter. In fact, the iPad has never been able to join one and it doesn't seem to be a problem with them. Corporate infrastructures are adapting to support the comsumer based devices being brought in by employees... it's just a simple fact. Corporations save a lot of money when they don't have to buy their employees devices, so the trade offs are worth it.

Bill

Re:But the iPad can't either!

[0123456]

The fact that the Win RT based devices can't join a domain doesn't matter. In fact, the iPad has never been able to join one and it doesn't seem to be a problem with them.

I think you miss the point. Why buy a Windows tablet if it doesn't have the Windows features that you're used to?

If a Windows tablet is no easier to integrate into your business than an iPad, why not just buy an iPad?

Re:But the iPad can't either!

[Bert64]

Microsoft have already had tablets available which could do both of these things for many years, they didn't sell and part of the reason why is that most existing windows apps are pretty much unusable on a tablet interface.

Why is anyone surprised?

[Weaselmancer]

Remember Windows Vista? Not finished. The finished version is called Windows 7.

This is Microsoft SOP. There is a shipping date, which shall be met. Functionality and bug fixes will be added later depending on what complaints they get in the press.

Re:Why is anyone surprised?

[93 Escort Wagon]

Remember Windows Vista? Not finished. The finished version is called Windows 7.

This is Microsoft SOP. There is a shipping date, which shall be met. Functionality and bug fixes will be added later depending on what complaints they get in the press.

Um... did you not notice how many times Vista's "shipping date" got pushed back? It was four or five years later than initially intended!

Windows CE all over?

[linebackn]

It seems as if Windows 8 for ARM is simply turning in to another Windows CE. That is, it is a fork rather than a direct port of the Windows OS with many unique differences.

Back in the NT 4 days you could sit at a DEC Alpha machine and not even notice you were running on a different architecture until you tried to run an x86 executable. (Even then it could run 16-bit Windows 3.1 via an emulator that visually looked exactly the same as running a 16-bit program on NT 4 x86 and later there was FX32) The point is it had the same functionality as the other ports.

Re:Windows CE all over?

[cnettel]

Windows on ARM is far closer to Windows 8 than Windows CE ever was to NT. CE was a clean-slate implementation, maybe borrowing some NT code. Windows on ARM seems to be more similar to something aking to XP Home or Media Center Edition, with the extra twist of another architecture and an arbitrary group policy decision (it's nothing more, really) not to allow third-party binaries in the traditional Windows GUI (e.g. only Metro apps). It is even so that Win32 API calls will be allowed for some Metro apps, including web browsers, even on ARM.

So, in the end, it is a marketing and feature set decision. Apple has been successful with the walled-garden approach, and that's what Windows RT will be marketed as, with the slight bonus of offering the "real" Microsoft Office.

Re:Windows CE all over?

[sonicmerlin]

Will they include a HAL in Windows RT that allows people/hackers to install it on virtually any ARM architecture? Like... say an HP Touchpad?

Re:Windows CE all over?

[TemporalBeing]

Will they include a HAL in Windows RT that allows people/hackers to install it on virtually any ARM architecture? Like... say an HP Touchpad?

WinRT is WinNT just as much as Win8/7/Vista/XP/2k/NT4/NT3.5/NT3 are. As such it will have the full HAL and everything else. It just won't have binary compatibility with the X86/X86-64 lines of Windows, much like WinNT PPC/MIPS/etc. was in the past.

Unlike WinCE, WinRT will probably be built from the same exact code-base as Win8 X86/X86-64; again, just like the WinNT PPC/MIPS/etc that they use to have.

WinCE was a completely separate code-base that was usually provided to embedded developers to port to their own CPU architectures. As such, they could modify it to get better performance out of it, remove what wasn't necessarily, etc. But it also left out the HAL and many other things.

Re:They ran out of time years ago

[TheRaven64]

I quite a few tablets on the train recently, but the only one I got close enough to to read the the make was an Asus tablet of some kind.

Airprint

[MicroSlut]

I will be happy if it simply allows LPR or SPM printing. Printing from an iPad sucks.

Re:Airprint

[Cito]

yea printing from ipad or any ios device sucks

but once I jailbroke my ipod touch and my ipad and use the printing stack on cydia omg it's like night and day, I have 100% total control over printing and can print anything, even using my wireless canon pixma mp560 using the jailbreak app i can tell my canon to print double sided and set all the properties as if i were on my windows desktop adjusting them.

jailbroken idevices is where the real power is at, once i jailbroke my ipod touch and got the new bluetooth stack and program called airblue It gives me full control over the bluetooth in the device, where before apple would only let idevices speak with each other when it came to file transfer idevice to idevice and only specific bluetooth devices such as headsets and gps systems.

but with airblue from cydia on a jailbroken device you get full bluetooth control, I can transfer photos from my LG cell phone to my ipod touch via bluetooth, and can pair with any gps device or even use my cellphone as a gps device. I can also tether internet access using bluetooth now.

So if I'm not near any wifi hotspot, I can use my cellphone as a hotspot with bluetooth, connect my ipad or ipod touch to the cellphone via bluetooth jailbroken app and can use my cellphone as the hotspot to hop online and do whatever.

If apple unlocked their devices they'd be more popular and more powerful... There is no way in hell I'd stay with a walled garden idevice, they are shit on their own.

but jailbroken you can unlock full power of them, hell for fun I even compiled apache on my ipod and installed piratebox, so even when it's in my pocket people can connect to my ipod like a hot spot, they are automatically given a webpage with files they can download, google piratebox :)

Re:Airprint

[dingen]

I agree printing should be easier. But seriously, is printing really that relevant on a mobile device? You can just as easily bring your device instead of a sheet of paper and read right off the screen. Especially since resolutions are on the rise, the experience comes pretty close to real paper. Printing is becoming less important in general, but especially on tablets I don't see why you would want to print something to paper at all.

Re:Airprint

[MicroSlut]

I thought the OP was griping about corporate use? In a business environment printing is very relevant. Checklists, spreadsheets, labels, maps, directions, notes, instructions, letters, boarding passes, checks, etc. If someone at work could not print, there would be hell to pay in ten minutes. At home what good is checking in for your flight on your iPad if you need to purchase an Airprint compatible multifunction printer just to print you boarding pass? At work we don't purchase color multifunction Airprint compatible consumer printers. We have big ass laser copiers that you need to purchase a $20 app in order to print to (Toshiba) and the apps don't work for shit. My co-workers Windows phone can print to our Toshiba. Sorry, but sometimes you absolutely need to print that one single thing. When you cannot, you realize you are not using a general purpose computer; you are using a useful toy. No matter how useful it is, it cannot compete with the flexibility of a general purpose computer. As another poster pointed out, iPads become more relevant once Jailbroken, so flexibility is not actually an iPad problem, it is an Apple problem.

Re:Airprint

[dingen]

I don't know about your company, but over here they are handing out iPads to workers because they expect them to use less paper. They're even removing trash cans in order to motivate people to create less dead trees. All of the things you mention are expected to be used from the screen of the tablet, not from paper.

Re:Airprint

[Bert64]

Printing, like many things on iOS devices, is very easy *if* you are willing to buy into the whole stack, so having a compatible printer etc...

Re:It's a huge undertaking

[TheRaven64]

Even after Microsoft dropped support for non-Intel architectures with Windows 2000

They dropped support for non-Intel architectures, but not for non-x86 architectures. Windows Server 2008 was the last version to have Itanium support, and it shares more or less the same kernel as the consumer editions (or, rather, they're all branched from the same development tree) so processor independence never really went away in Windows NT. ARM is a lot more similar to x86 than Itanium, in terms of parts of the machine model that are exposed in C/C++ level. It's pretty hard to write C/C++ code that will work on x86, x86-64 and Itanium, but not ARM.

Just keep waving the hands

[SuperKendall]

Exactly, you're perfectly explained why the XBox 360 can't join a domain either. They must have run out of time!

I was not aware the Sony PS3 was making huge inroads into enterprises the way the iPad is.

Re:Just keep waving the hands

[recoiledsnake]

Take some time to read this:

http://blogs.msdn.com/b/b8/archive/2012/04/19/managing-quot-byo-quot-pcs-in-the-enterprise-including-woa.aspx

There are a whole host of enterprise features that Windows RT supports.

If they're not enough, you can get a Windows 8 x86 tablet, which will support anything that a desktop PC currently supports.

Why didn't the article link to that blog post or talk about it? It's plain FUD targeted at people like you and the MS haters have lapped it up hook, line and sinker like they've done with the author's previous articles. I am sure you can make a case that the features are not enough, but not even mentioning them AT ALL shows that it's a FUD article designed to drive page hits.

See the submitter of this fake benchmark article:

http://tech.slashdot.org/firehose.pl?op=view&type=story&sid=10/02/18/0429258

Look at the submitter of this Slashdot story. It's the same Computer World guy.

Here's Slashdot post about how the above article was a fake.

http://news.slashdot.org/story/10/02/21/2329249/windows-7-memory-usage-critic-outed-as-fraud

Re:Just keep waving the hands

[recoiledsnake]

You're contradicting your own arguments. If Windows RT lacks key enterprise tools because it's targeted at consumers, why would it have "a whole host of enterprise features", as you put it?

There is no contradiction.
Have you heard of BYOD? (Bring Your Own Device)

Windows RT is supported in that scenario, that's why it has enterprise features but not to the same extent as on-premise PCs.

My main point was that the article did not even mention the blog published by Microsoft which is the biggest chunk of information ever released about Windows RT's enterprise support.

Re:Just keep waving the hands

[MightyMartian]

I love these catchphrases. Reading the documentation, all BYOD seemst to mean is that they can operate in a Windows-for-workgroups mode, caching authentication and being smart enough to pass it on to domain servers. Through the magic of marketing, a capability that has been in consumer grade Windows operating systems for sixteen or seventeen years now suddenly is The New Hot Thing!

Re:Just keep waving the hands

[maccodemonkey]

There are a whole host of enterprise features that Windows RT supports.

Unfortunately, reading through that article, they're at best only matching iOS and Android on those things. Apple is even a licensee of ActiveSync with the best mobile implementation currently, even better than WP7.

To really beat Apple, they had to get Active Directory support, which is the one bridge Apple hasn't crossed. They didn't... so... they probably won't make much of a splash.

Re:It's a huge undertaking

[TheRaven64]

It's slightly easier. Things like JITs are easier to port in the other direction (targeting ARM or Thumb-2[EE] from a typical bytecode is easier than targeting x86), but any high-level code just sees a relaxation in some restrictions. You have the same endian on both. Both incur a performance hit for unaligned loads and stores, and old ARM doesn't support them at all, so it's possible to do some pointer arithmetic and casting that will work on x86 and not ARM, but it's pretty hard and usually it will just be a bit slow on ARM (if the compiler knows it's unaligned it can work around it with some two loads and mask + shift).

Re:They ran out of time years ago

[Overly Critical Guy]

As willing as I am to accept the sample size of "people negRo_slim on Slashdot knows", I think I'll trust industry data:

iPad Enterprise Adoption Up To 80% In Fortune 100

Re:why....

[spire3661]

Why not? why differentiate between clients? your pocket computer(phone) is jsut as valid a computer as a desktop as far as the network is concerned. Dont you think that at some point your 'phone' is going to be your only computer that you carry with you and then dock with at work and home?

Re:It's a huge undertaking

[Penguinisto]

I think the Vista debacle taught them that simply patching later on down the road won't help the product reputation any (seriously - Apple's growth w/ OSX really took off when Vista released). I also suspect that Microsoft can't afford to have too many turns at saying: "yeah it's a major missing feature, but we can always patch that in later".

This isn't 1999 anymore. There's actual competition out there now, and Microsoft can ill afford to have such a blase' attitude towards the consumer, *or* the enterprise.

Just doing what they always do

[maroberts]

Rush out a bodged product to market and fix it in Service Pack 1.

Re:Just doing what they always do

[Lonewolf666]

Hey, that's an improvement!

In ye olden days it was Service Pack 3 that made Microsoft products OK.

What are your semantics?

[Anonymous Coward]

Microsoft has always had a strong enterprise relationship

If by "strong enterprise relationship", you mean "had them firmly by the balls", then yes.

If by "strong enterprise relationship", you mean "had their respect", you need to get out more.

The again, whores don't want your respect - they just want your money.

Slashdot "evidence"

[Anonymous Coward]

"Oh, well a few people I know own Android-based tablets and use Windows PC, so clearly iPads haven't taken over!" Apple sells more iPads in one quarter than total Android tablets have sold since the introduction of Android, and the sales data regarding iPads and desktop PCs is easily found via the most trivial of Google searches.

If you honestly believe the iPad doesn't dominate the tablet market, you are out of touch. This isn't a judgement either way on iPads or Android or Windows. It's just stating widely-known facts about the current state of the industry.

Re:Slashdot "evidence"

[sonicmerlin]

The only problem I have with the iPad is it doesn't have text reflow in the browser. My eyesight isn't that great, and if they'd just add that one feature it would be such a beautiful product.

Re:what do you want to manage in the first place

[Penguinisto]

A tablet is meant as a terminal front end to a cloud based application .. what is it you would like to manage on it in the first place.

Speaking from the Enterprise environment, I can name three things right off...

1) prevent users from parking games on my work tablets.
2) lock down where users go with the web browser on the tablet to just those sites I want them to go.
3) do those first two things without having to go nuts with subnets, or custom proxy settings, or having to go crazy modifying my network - because if I have to do any of that, I may as well just get them iPads.

Might be a different model...

[Junta]

As much as I'd like to imagine MS bumbling a release, I'd wager this is intentional. I also don't think of it as an 'enterprise' v. 'consumer' play. As some has pointed out, there is little reason to believe it couldn't be trivially carried over from the x86 codebase, but MS may not see it as relevant to the way a tablet would likely work, even in an enterprise scenario.

AD is built upon a strategy that was explicitly designed for fixed position systems in a corporate environment, owned by a company, logging into resources managed centrally by one coherent team, and to some extent potentially shared/interchangeable amongst employees. Back in the mid 90s when MS designed their implementation of domains, the world was a lot different. Even in the current reality of people with travelling laptops already feels very awkward, though it is serviceable. In an environment where resources spend at least as much time outside as in, where increasingly companies are getting employees to volunteer personally owned equipment instead of company issued equipment, where rarely does more than one person ever use a particular system, where people are often authenticating to multiple companies during the course of their work, and management is increasingly decentralized, active directory value significantly erodes.

It may be the case that MS recognizes the concept of a system 'joining an AD domain' as ill-fitting of the usage model. Joining a domain requires the 'system' be authenticated, to facilitate the case of the system to provide others service independent of user. This just doesn't happen with tablets and is unlikely to happen with tablets (after all, they are suspended unless a user is pretty much actively engaged and they are pretty much consume-only type devices). Maintaining the concept of the user and the user's system as independent just doesn't have practical benefit.

Of course, as a strategy this is certainly dubious. Even if it is a bad idea, MS has a lot of mindshare of companies without much vision in this regard. Those companies are a gold mine for companies like MS.

Re:Might be a different model...

[MightyMartian]

AD works fine for me with road warrior notebooks. They connect via VPN, the VPN network segments having their own DC so the VPN becomes another "site". It's really nice for rolling out updates, making sure configuration settings are all in order and creating what the experience we feel important for those who work out of the office. Most important of all, it's the ability to enforce security settings.

To this point, mobile devices have got away with things by only being limited-use devices; basically you check your corporate email and calendar. But if you're talking about moving to the next step, with devices that can more directly access network resources like file shares, then why shouldn't network admins be able to apply group policies to these devices?

Re:Might be a different model...

[Junta]

I said it was serviceable, but road warrior AD function is actually fairly awkward if you take a step away and consider it objectively. The way credentials pretty much must be cached in order to overcome the chicken and the egg problem and leads to some inconsistency between vpn connected and initial boot state in how it works. Being forced to explicitly manage a user's system indepedent of the user seems a bit weird in the case where a system is not really anything more than an extension of the owner, unlike a server or shared system where the distinction makes sense.

While some portion of what AD provides may make sense, the model as a philosophy may not endure. Basically I'm picturing something that provides the assurances/benefits you want without the awkwardness of elements of the authentication and having to manage single-user devices indpendentry of the user they are dedicated to.

Re:Might be a different model...

[MightyMartian]

In other words an end to centralized policy. If that's the case I suggest the mobile OS designers do a lot more to lock down devices. If an enterprise is to lose considerable authority over devices that connect to its network, then the powers left to it should be considerable. Enterprises are being forced to tolerate devices on their networks that in many cases are very weak compared to their desktop cousins.

The Enterprise

[mr_lizard13]

It seems to me that the a key goal was to get battery life decent and keep the weight [of devices] down.'

And that's exactly what the priorities should be for portable devices.

His analysis on RT's chance of success: 'I think you can take Windows RT off the table for enterprises,' he said."

Why? Apple's iPad doesn't support the feature set that Cherry describes either, and yet it's become the fastest growing tablet in the enterprise. In fact, it's the only tablet device with any traction in that space at all. Something like 60% of the Fortune 500 have deployed iPad or have a deployment plan in the trial stages. When did that last happen with a piece of technology less than 2 years old?

There are plenty of reasons why I think Microsoft's efforts in tablets won't be successful, but the iPad's success has shown that not supporting a core Windows feature set needn't be one of them.

Oh, for fuck sake!

[Alex Belits]

Windows on tablet did not get those features because they require uninterrupted network connectivity with a "mothership" domain controller. What does not happen on handhelds.

The whole "analysis" is a ploy to proclaim Windows on ARM "Enterprise-ready" once Microsoft will figure out how to produce domain support with everything cached on the client. What will eventually happen even though it makes no sense.

In reality, handhelds have to be treated as insecure clients, must allow user flexibility in applications configuration and should never be allowed direct filesystem access, however Windows developers are too dumb to make an equivalent of FUSE, rsync and a package manager. My almost-abandonware Nokia N900 has better "enterprise support" now than those Windows "analysts" (marketing people) can ever imagine.

Re:Oh, for fuck sake!

[MobyDisk]

Windows on tablet did not get those features because they require uninterrupted network connectivity with a "mothership" domain controller. What does not happen on handhelds.

None of the missing features listed require uninterrupted network connectivity. Corporations do this all the time with laptops that travel around. You can login and use local resources just fine without connection to the domain controller.

Re:Oh, for fuck sake!

[Alex Belits]

They do, but they still have to authenticate to do things users may expect to do with unreliable connectivity, and still end up preventing configuration by the local user. On a "company laptop" it's tolerable but on a handheld it will be a mess.

Re:Oh, for fuck sake!

[Guy Harris]

They do, but they still have to authenticate to do things users may expect to do with unreliable connectivity, and still end up preventing configuration by the local user. On a "company laptop" it's tolerable but on a handheld it will be a mess.

So what's the difference between a "company laptop" and a tablet? Is there some difference between a laptop - "company" or not - and a tablet, or is the distinction between a company machine (whether laptop or tablet) and a Bring Your Own Device machine (whether laptop or tablet), or is there some magical combination of "not company" and "tablet" that causes an explosion?

Re:Oh, for fuck sake!

[Alex Belits]

So what's the difference between a "company laptop" and a tablet?

Company laptop can become a brick with nothing but Microsoft Office functioning while not connected to the home/hotel/coffee shop network. Company laptop doesn't have to be able to reload a web page while connectivity is going up and down every second. Tablet or a phone should have shitloads of applications running in a background through thousands of connect-disconnect-suspend-restore cycles. Company laptop can be limited to only company-provided applications but phone or even tablet is pretty useless without them. Company laptop does not double as a phone. Company laptop would cause a disaster if stolen while phones are guaranteed to be stolen regularly.

Re:Oh, for fuck sake!

[MobyDisk]

None of your points support the statement that you originally made, which was that enterprise features require constant network connectivity. You are adding FUD by implying that a company phone couldn't make phone calls unless it is connected to the domain, and by bringing up theft issues which also have nothing to do with connecting to Windows domains.

Re:Oh, for fuck sake!

[Alex Belits]

None of your points support the statement that you originally made, which was that enterprise features require constant network connectivity.

They do for everything "enterprise-related", and current state of proclaimed "enterprise features" is incompatible with a mobile device.

You are adding FUD by implying that a company phone couldn't make phone calls unless it is connected to the domain, and by bringing up theft issues which also have nothing to do with connecting to Windows domains.

A tablet or a phone must be able to deal with more than making calls. Handling address books, installing and updating software, etc. all require constant connectivity with servers, something that can't be expected on a mobile device. This is supposed to be acceptable for a "company laptop" but not for anything smaller.

Re:They ran out of time years ago

[TheRaven64]

Sorry, the missing verb was 'saw'.

You're not a cross platform kinda guy, I see ...

[Zero__Kelvin]

"Porting a Linux distro to ARM does not mean rewriting the code from the ground up, it means recompiling with different flags... why would it be any different for Windows?"

It would be very different, because Linux was written from the ground up by competent engineers with portability in mind. Windows was written by some very competent engineers, and many more with -shall we say - much less competence. In order to port Windows to ARM they have to find every place where an assumption was made about internal representation of data structures, word size, endian-ness, and a host of other issues.

Initially NT was DEC Alpha and x86, but they scrapped Alpha support. The reason is simple. Writing portable code, especially in languages like C and C++ take skill, significant effort, and additional time. Obviously, a company that couldn't be bothered to put the time and effort into develop secure code could not be bothered to invest the effort to make it portable either.

Re:It's a huge undertaking

[Billly Gates]

This assumes businesses bother to upgrade. There is a lot of shitware out there. Software just coming out today requiring IE 7, XP, and some still only works in Windows 98 but it only runs in Windows 98 because of some band aids made to it because it runs best under Windows 3.11 etc.

The solution was to switch to internet cloud apps. Now they require IE 6 still and we have the same problem all over again and accountants who get bonuses by saying wait IE 6 works fine, I can still view cnn with it and therefore the web will still support it for free. Why switch?

I am hoping html 5 and cloud apps will change this. We have standards now but it wont surprise me to see people tying it in with bad code. No one would have thought 10 years ago that IE 6 would be as proprietary as the VB apps they replaced.

Dynamic Tension

[Bozovision]

Strategy is where it's at.

Microsoft and Intel are companies that have a co-dependent relationship: MS depends on Intel to bring out new chips - driving better computers, because when someone buys a new computer they pay the Windows tax. But Intel got into bed with Apple too, because being dependent on MS alone is an uncomfortable place to be; remember what happened to [fill in your own long list of companies]. So MS needed to explain to Intel who is in charge in the relationship. And spending a few million dollars to make a version of Windows which does not depend on Intel is a good way to do it. It's got other benefits too: it might spur Intel into making an i86 architecture chip and chipset that can compete with Apple A-series (something intel is not keen on doing, apparently, or we'd have seen it), it strings ARM along for a bit, it's a useful cloak for any antitrust investigation into the relationship between Intel and Microsoft, it reminds Apple that encroaching on Windows territory is a bad idea, it provides an option for future development, and it's good for PR because journalists love to talk about new goodies.

All-in-all a pretty good strategic list of why you'd want to do this. And only costing a few million.

Of course you don't want to have a properly working version because that _really would_ jeopardize the relationship with Intel. So you make sure it's incompatible with Windows-proper in a variety of ways, like being unable to run Windows programs without extra work, and you make sure that in the existing form it doesn't threaten the business market.

But maybe you privately demo to Intel versions that can do these things.

Re:They ran out of time years ago

[Anonymous Coward]

My employer with 100K employees worldwide is rolling out a major sales support iPad package to a few thousand reps. You just don't know the right businesses it seems.

As for BYOD for the rest of us with mobile business needs (remote IT support all around the globe being one large group), the key criterion for our devices is that they be wipe-able remotely via Activesync, and iPhones (since a v3 update?), and Android (since 2.2) and WinMobile from about 5 through 6.5 meet that requirement. I think the WM 7 major update a while back finally allowed it to get on the corp network. This is driven to some degree by the cost-saving consideration to phase out BES and company-purchased Blackberries - their enterprise-grade security is not seen as being worth the extra cost over what can be done via Activesync it seems (esp since many of my colleagues are gaga over iOS and Android).

Does anyone even care?

[Cute Fuzzy Bunny]

I know the tech folks get warm and wet over arm although they have a hard time articulating why anyone else would want it. If I wanted it, I sure as shoot wouldnt want big fat honking windows on it. Its a lightweight processor. Put a lightweight operating system on it like one of the 5000 we already have.

Windows is dead anyhow. Just hasn't quit moving yet.

Re:Does anyone even care?

[SpryGuy]

WinRT/Win8 isn't really "big", "Fat", or "Honking". WinRT by itself is pretty lightweight actually.

Re:Does anyone even care?

[Cute Fuzzy Bunny]

How big is the distribution compared to ios or android? I'm betting its a LOT bigger and a lot slower. And still a solution looking for a problem.

More to business than domain join, iPad proves

[chentiangemalc]

iPad has become increasingly popular across large enterprise without domain join or group policy. Windows RT will support exchange email,/calendar.....most critical feature for enterprise tablets,plus it will include Office, iPad still lacks good office software (at least for complex documents). Policy management, like ipad,can be controlled via Exchange ActiveSync policies. At the end of the day full group policy & domain join would be overkill for these devices.

Consumer expectations vs. corporate

[SpryGuy]

WinRT is targed squarely at consumers... casual users, to compete with the iPad. The problem is, Consumers expect significant updates at least annually. Will Microsoft update WinRT every year, vs. every three years? And if they do, will other Windows 8 versions update as well?

The problem with THAT is that Enterprises and businesses want stability. It's why so many are still on XP. They don't WANT to update every year. It's too much risk, and it's too much expense (training, IT expenses, etc).

I have no idea how Microsoft is going to walk this tightrope. Maybe that's why they partitioned ARM/WinRT off sparate from other verisons. But it's still going to be an issue regardless.

Re:Consumer expectations vs. corporate

[SpryGuy]

Not talking about hardware (although they still expect new models every year).

I'm talking about software. The OS itself. You know, where iOS is updated with every new model release (we're up to iOS5) and where Android is updated every 6-18 months (we're on "IceCream Sandwich" now, which is the ninth major version of Android since initial release).

People are going to EXPECT that their "WinRT" and "Win8" Tablets get updates every year. If they don't, then they're just going to fall way behind the competition, and excitement will ebb, and consumers will abandon ship to the other, more exciting platforms.

Re:You're not a cross platform kinda guy, I see ..

[makomk]

ARM has the same endianness and word size as x86. It's probably part of the reason it's so widely used.

Re:They ran out of time years ago

[Tough Love]

...even Android hasn't yet found any footing there without the carrier infrastructure that helped it to compete with the iPhone in the smartphone industry...

Since when is 35% market share not "footing"?

Re:why....

[aristotle-dude]

Why not? why differentiate between clients? your pocket computer(phone) is jsut as valid a computer as a desktop as far as the network is concerned. Dont you think that at some point your 'phone' is going to be your only computer that you carry with you and then dock with at work and home?

Because it does not make sense, that's why. A smartphone likely spends a lot more time "outside" of your office than inside the office. Smartphones are not designed to be general purpose computer. Why insist on using old technology like Active Directory? To make it easier for unskilled drones with an "MCSE" to screw up smart phones too?

service pack 1

[holophrastic]

I'm sure they just don't want to risk the enterprise market on day one. See how the device works in the consumer world first. the service pack will add more features if the general product works out, maybe that'll include enterprise features.

and, by the way, arm sucks. that's the definition of arm: for lower requirements. get the 86 tablet, and you can have whatever you want right away.

Re:what do you want to manage in the first place

[Penguinisto]

x86 tablets are more expensive per unit. In the end, it's all about that cost (especially at the budgets most folks have to deal with these days).

Re:You're not a cross platform kinda guy, I see ..

[damiangerous]

NT was developed solely non x86 hardware specifically for portability. First on i860 based systems and later MIPS. If the code wasn't highly portable, then there would never have been an x86 version, because that version was a port. The Alpha version was not "scrapped", not by Microsoft anyway. Alphas were fully supported up through the latest NT 4 service pack. We would have had Windows 2k for the Alpha as well if Compaq didn't decide they no longer wanted to support Alphas.

Window Really Terrible ?

[maxbash]

Wow, I LMAO when I heard this being a real name for Windows. Did nobody at Microsoft remember the Internet Meme Windows RG (Really Good)? http://www.deanliou.com/WinRG/ So, instantly I thought "Windows Really Terrible"?

Re:You're not a cross platform kinda guy, I see ..

[LO0G]

Actually according to Inside Windows NT, NT was Intel i860 only, then x86, then MIPs.

Alpha didn't come along until significantly later.

Look to the recent past

[Casandro]

From Windows for Workgroups to Windows 2000, every version was able to join a domain. Only in Windows XP they deliberately took it out for some subversions.

Then ARM is the first non-x86 platform Windows is ported too without an Emulator. That makes those devices virtually useless in a serious enterprise environment, because none of your software will work on them. (Alpha had one)

This is deliberate.

Enterprises?

[jevring]

'I think you can take Windows RT off the table for enterprises,' Really? Off the table for enterprises? I'm fairly certain it wasn't even aimed at enterprises in the first place? Secondly, what enterprise deploys tablet computers to their employees?

Re:what do you want to manage in the first place

[Bert64]

1) this is a company policy, i've yet to see a corporate windows desktop where you couldn't run games anyway, at most they make it slightly more difficult... not being allowed to install games is a rule that users must follow or face disciplinary action, relying on flawed technical measures generally means that policing of the rules becomes far more lax.

2/3) you should be doing this at the proxy/network level anyway, relying on the client itself is a fundamentally flawed approach (client side security) and can easily be overcome.

Re:You're not a cross platform kinda guy, I see ..

[Guy Harris]

"Porting a Linux distro to ARM does not mean rewriting the code from the ground up, it means recompiling with different flags... why would it be any different for Windows?"

It would be very different, because Linux was written from the ground up by competent engineers with portability in mind. Windows was written by some very competent engineers, and many more with -shall we say - much less competence. In order to port Windows to ARM they have to find every place where an assumption was made about internal representation of data structures, word size, endian-ness, and a host of other issues.

By "Linux" are you referring to the Linux kernel, in which case you should be comparing it to the NT kernel-mode code, or are you referring to the Linux distributions as a whole, in which case I would not be so quick to assume that all of "Linux" in that sense "was written from the ground up by competent engineers with portability in mind".

(And as for whether even the Linux kernel was "written from the ground up by competent engineers with portability in mind", well, I'll let somebody whom a lot of people would consider a very competent engineer speak to that issue when he said, back in 1991, "It is NOT protable[sic] (uses 386 task switching etc), and it probably never will support anything other than AT-harddisks, as that’s all I have :-(.)

Initially NT was DEC Alpha and x86, but they scrapped Alpha support.

Actually, it initially supported x86, MIPS, and Alpha, with MIPS support coming out earlier than Alpha support, with PowerPC support added later.

The reason is simple. Writing portable code, especially in languages like C and C++ take skill, significant effort, and additional time. Obviously, a company that couldn't be bothered to put the time and effort into develop secure code could not be bothered to invest the effort to make it portable either.

If it supported Alpha and MIPS in addition to x86, they apparently did make an effort to make it portable. Whether it made sense to make the effort to keep it portable, given that this involved testing on various Alpha-based and MIPS-based machines and PowerPC-based machines in addition to x86-based machines, and given the relative number of x86-based and non-x86-based machines sold, is another matter; it may have been an arguably-sensible business decision to drop support for non-x86 platforms.

Re:It's a huge undertaking

[bheading]

Yeah I was about to say "non-x86" until I remembered that Itanium was in there. I've never used an Itanium box but I had guessed that it wouldn't be conceptually completely divorced from the x86.

I've not done a massive amount of work at the low level on x86 but from what I've seen it's massively more complicated than ARM, especially all the addressing mode silliness. But of course none of that should matter. Keeping an OS portable across architectures is not as hard these days as it might once have been.

Application compatibility as main reason?

[Lonewolf666]

You have some good points (and so have those who speculated that porting to ARM was more difficult/time consuming than expected).

But what I have not seen mentioned so far, is that existing x86 applications won't run on ARM and that this might be a major problem for the enterprise. Emulation does not look promising either, as ARM CPUs are somewhat on the weak side in terms of performance and emulation "costs extra". Neither have I seen tablet - adapted versions of Microsoft Outlook and Office yet (would that even make sense for stuff like Word and Excel??).

So even if Microsoft manages to offer a Windows version on ARM that works with domains and other networky stuff like Exchange, it would still lack the applications that are most likely to make it attractive for the enterprise. Of course, Microsoft could pull an XBox and pour some billion $ into creating the most important of those applications. But so far I see no signs of that.

Re:You're not a cross platform kinda guy, I see ..

[cbhacking]

Psh, wow, idiotic MS-bashing ahoy! They've screwed up plenty of things, but portability of the OS is not one of them.

It's been policy, thoughout the entire NT project, to maintain a non-x86 port specificlaly to avoid letting non-portable code in. In the early days it was Alpha, then also things like MIPS and PPC, then Itanium (which, say what you will about it, is extremely far from x86 despite coming from the same company). With MS dropping Itanium support, they moved to ARM as the alternate platform. Then of course there's AMD64, which doesn't even really count (being basically an extension of x86) but does still mean that they can't even make 32-bit assumptions.

Also, I hate to tell you, but you're completely off-base about "Linux was written from the ground up ... with portability in mind." Portability has certainly become a major feature of the Linux kernel in the last few decades, but when it was started it was exclusively focused on the 386. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linux_kernel Read the text of the comp.os.minix post, and the section under Portability. By comparison, the initial development of the NT kernel explicitly did *not* target x86. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_NT#32-bit_platforms

Re:It's a huge undertaking

[TheRaven64]

If you're writing assembly, obviously there are differences, but there are a few things that leak up into the C/C++ abstract machine. These include:

• Alignment requirements
• Endian
• Word size

And, of course, performance. ARM and x86 have more or less the same alignment requirements these days. ARM is slightly more strict, but in the cases where you get it wrong the OS gets an illegal instruction trap and can fix it for you (it's very slow, but if it's not on a hot code path you won't notice). They are both little endian (ARM isn't always, but it normally is these days), and both are LP32.

There are a few more subtle issues, mainly relating to performance. For example, on x86 (but not x86-64), operations on floats and doubles are both calculated at 80-bit precision in the x87 coprocessor and are only truncated to 32 or 64 bits when storing to memory. This means that you may get rounding errors at different places on ARM (or at different optimisation levels on x86), but it also means that calculations on floats and doubles run at the same speed on x86, whereas doubles are typically a lot slower than floats on ARM. On x86-64, these both use the SSE unit, so you will only notice a performance difference if your compiler manages to do some autovectorisation (in theory, you can push twice as many 32-bit operations through SSE as 64-bit ones, but in practice it's rare for compilers to get this unless you're using vector extensions or intrinsics).

In terms of addressing modes, ARM and x86 are actually quite similar. ARM has a single addressing mode, but it also allows you to combine a fixed shift with any arithmetic instruction, so you can do more or less the same with one or two instructions on ARM as you can with any of the complex addressing modes on x86. You don't have segmentation, but no one really uses that on x86 since it isn't present in x86-64.

Porting something like .NET, which needs to generate code at run time, is difficult, but Microsoft has had a .NET VM running on ARM for years for the mobile space, so this isn't new code.

Re:You're not a cross platform kinda guy, I see ..

[Zero__Kelvin]

I didn't say that Linus initially conceived it as portable or that it started out that way. Early on in the development cycle it went cross platform. They did some redesign and design improvements well before it was in a state that a proprietary company would consider offering as a release. If you look at the source code, you can clearly see that cross platform is not something tacked on as an afterthought. Security and cross platform capability cannot easily be thrown in after the fact. And who the hell is talking about NT?

Re:You're not a cross platform kinda guy, I see ..

[Zero__Kelvin]

By Linux I'm referring to Linux. If one doesn't know that Linux is a kernel then it makes further discussion fruitless, now, doesn't it.

Re:You're not a cross platform kinda guy, I see ..

[Zero__Kelvin]

Great. Now can we get back to the subject? I already said NT was initially cross platform. We aren't talking about NT. Even if we were, the fact that they were somewhat portable at one time has nothing to do with the fact that it is clearly not 100% portable now. Oh yeah ... and welcome to 2012.

Re:You're not a cross platform kinda guy, I see ..

[Zero__Kelvin]

NT was never DEC Alpha only.

Shouldn't this be trivial?

[gatkinso]

I may be off in my thinking, but all of this functionality is probably written in C or C++.

So why can't they simply recompile it for ARM?

Re:You're not a cross platform kinda guy, I see ..

[Zero__Kelvin]

That would be an awesome trick! The x86 architecture doesn't always have the same word size. Also, endianess is programmable on ARM. Since network endianess is Big-endian it is a design trade off decision which way to set the chip.

Re:You're not a cross platform kinda guy, I see ..

[swissmonkey]

If you weren't such an idiot you would know that :
- Windows NT was built with portability as a central goal. It didn't run on x86 to start with, they chose the i860, an exotic CPU on purpose to avoid x86-centric assumptions. It ran on a wide variety of CPUs from x86 to i860 to PPC to Mips to Alpha to even Sparc (not released publicly) to Itanium to amd64 to now ARM.
- Linux was originally built as x86 only, totally contradicting your claims, they had to pretty much rewrite the kernel to make it portable, so the OS built from the ground up with portability was NT, not Linux !
- Microsoft is viewed today by pretty much the entire security industry as THE company when it comes to secure software development. Every security head from Dan Kaminsky to Charlie Miller to Bruce Schneider will tell you that. You clearly have no clue about the subject

So really, you're clueless and got it totally wrong.

Re:You're not a cross platform kinda guy, I see ..

[swissmonkey]

The truth is that you have absolutely NO basis to claim that Windows NT (it's latest incarnations being Win7 / Win8) is not portable today. You're just making baseless claims based on your wishes.
You have absolutely no clue as you've shown in your previous posts as to how MS develops Windows, even less when it comes to secure software.

Now feel free to prove me wrong, give FACTS showing that NT is not portable TODAY.

Re:It's a huge undertaking

[swissmonkey]

There's no need for patching, the code builds and runs on ARM, it simply doesn't ship because it's not needed. There's no enterprise software that will run on if for a couple years anyway and by then next release will be there. So removing it saves on testing, RAM, HD space and support along with battery life & security (less attack surface).

Re:You're not a cross platform kinda guy, I see ..

[Guy Harris]

By Linux I'm referring to Linux. If one doesn't know that Linux is a kernel then it makes further discussion fruitless, now, doesn't it.

OK, then, if one doesn't know that "Linux" rather than "a Linux distribution" corresponds to "Windows NT's kernel-mode code" rather than "Windows", it makes further discussion fruitless.

I shall assume that when you said "It would be very different, because Linux was written from the ground up by competent engineers with portability in mind. Windows was written by some very competent engineers, and many more with -shall we say - much less competence.", you really meant "It would be very different, because Linux was written from the ground up by competent engineers with portability in mind. Windows NT's kernel-mode code was written by some very competent engineers, and many more with -shall we say - much less competence.", in which case I'd like to see some data to support your assertion that some of the engineers working on said kernel-mode code weren't competent enough to avoid making "[assumptions] about internal representation of data structures, word size, endian-ness, and a host of other issues".

Of course, the post to which you replied was speaking not just of the kernel-mode code, but all the code:

Porting a Linux distro to ARM does not mean rewriting the code from the ground up, it means recompiling with different flags... why would it be any different for Windows?

(emphasis mine), so merely speaking about the Linux kernel would not validly reply to that post. Perhaps some of the code in Windows-as-a-whole was written by engineers who couldn't avoid making said assumptions (although earlier versions of NT ran on MIPS, Alpha, and PowerPC, and apparently it was originally developed on i860 machines, and current versions run on x86 in 32-bit mode and x86-64 in 64-bit mode and earlier versions ran on Itanium in 64-bit mode, so at least for those versions they managed to avoid making some incorrect assumptions of that sort). However, not all of the code in pick-your-Linux-distribution-as-a-whole necessarily avoids making those assumptions, and porting the distribution as a whole might not be a snap (although Debian, at least, supports several architectures, so either the Debian packages that work on those architectures avoided making those assumptions or got them fixed when they failed to work on those architectures).

Re:Do you want to join a domain with a BYOD

[acoustix]

WinRT devices can be manged by Exchange Active-Sync polices that's the first step

In other words....they can't be managed. Active Sync policies are a joke compared to real mobile policy management like BES. Of course, RIM managed to screw that up by not supporting their tablets with BES.

It's almost as if tech giants like Apple, Microsoft, Google and others *want* IT shops to struggle with mobile management and security. VDI is still too expensive to deploy vs the cost of actual desktops. Providing a "free" VDI client license on a mobile device (whether is a smart phone or tablet) doesn't help. I have yet to see a company break even or come out ahead with VDI. The ROI simply isn't there.

Re:It's a huge undertaking

[blind biker]

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.

Indeed. I have a beta version of Win2K for PowerPC, on a MSDN CD. Or had, way back then.

When all you have for comfort is your hand ...

[Zero__Kelvin]

... I guess all you can think of is d*ck. He proved absolutely nothing, except that Linus didn't initially think "Hey, I'll make it portable." I admit that I should have said "from a couple of inches above the ground up" to be more accurate, but of course you are ignoring the whole point. Windows NT started out portable and then progressed toward lack of portability over time. Linux may have first been conceived as 386 only, but it became cross platform very early on, and an emphasis has been made to remain portable ever since.

Re:You're not a cross platform kinda guy, I see ..

[Zero__Kelvin]

It is hard to take seriously someone who compares a Linux distro, which is the kernel, userland tools, and pretty much every application most anyone could ever need to the Windows OS. If you want to talk about the Windows vs. Linux world OS' then you need to compare only the Linux kernel and userland tools to Windows. The minute you start trying to fold in every Open Source program available in a distro you just make it clear that you either wish to intentionally pervert the discussion, or you're just plain ignorant. Once you stop doing that and compare properly - lo and behold! - my claim of competent programmers who emphasize security and portability is suddenly impossible to contradict.

If I claimed Windows wasn't cross platform because Winzip isn't, you'd clearly call foul. That is what you just did, but with regard to Linux.

Re:You're not a cross platform kinda guy, I see ..

[Guy Harris]

It is hard to take seriously someone who compares a Linux distro, which is the kernel, userland tools, and pretty much every application most anyone could ever need to the Windows OS. If you want to talk about the Windows vs. Linux world OS' then you need to compare only the Linux kernel and userland tools to Windows.

OK, then let's compare the Linux kernel, and those userland tools equivalent to what comes with Windows. Do you have evidence to support a belief that, say, all the libraries in a Linux distribution that provide APIs equivalent to those provided by Windows, and the cores of the major desktop environments (both API cores and tools such as the file manager, Web browser, system configuration apps, etc.) were all written by "competent engineers with portability in mind", whilst the equivalent software in Windows wasn't? If not, then your claim of competent programmers who emphasize security and portability is suddenly lacking in evidence to support it.

Re:You're not a cross platform kinda guy, I see ..

[Zero__Kelvin]

You seem to think I care if you ever figure it out for some reason. The world is full of proof. You can see for yourself if you want. Don't expect me to do your homework for you.

Re:You're not a cross platform kinda guy, I see ..

[cbhacking]

Yep. Comparing kernels to kernels, you'd look at NT vs. Linux. Comparing OS distribution to OS distribution, you'd look at Win7 vs. Ubuntu-10.10 (or Server 2008 R2 vs. RHEL $VERSION, or whatever). I'm not going to claim that all of Microsoft's code is so portable, but the kernel (including graphics system), core libraries, and shell of the Windows OS certainly are.