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.

[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.

[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]

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.

[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.

[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.

[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.

[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.

[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.

[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.

[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.

[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.

[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.

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

[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

[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]

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.

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

WOA

[88NoSoup4U88]

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

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"

[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"

[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"

[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: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.

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?

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.

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: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.

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: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".

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.

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:Does anyone even care?

[SpryGuy]

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

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: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: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.

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