Samsung Won't Release Windows RT Tablet In US

New submitter sandoval88419 writes "During CES the U.S. head of Samsung Tablet business announced they won't release Windows RT devices in the U.S. Explanations are low demand, heavy investment to educate the consumer on the differences between windows RT and 8 and more importantly the effort to keep a low retail price with the Microsoft offering. "

Comments

No big loss

[colinrichardday]

Not that I wanted Windows RT

Re:No big loss

[Bing Tsher E]

This makes complete sense.

Why should Samsung expend resources to push a platform that will likely have the third best market share in Mobile OSes. They need to concentrate on keeping Android the best mobile platform.

Re:No big loss

[DarkOx]

I am sure they will sell Windows tablets just not Windows RT tablets.

You got to look at it this way. Windows RT exists only as a way for Microsoft to be price competitive and hopefully squeeze Android out without being seen as cannibalizing their higher priced higher margin product Windows. Microsoft biggest fear is droid or some Linux variant successfully moving "up market" and being sold on anyone's top line hardware because if the market place embraces it well, the value of the Windows property declines sharply.

Samsung lives with this reality.

They have customers who *need* windows for compatibility reasons, a large portion of those would not be served by WinRT anyway.
They have successful Android product lines they have already done the startup investment in so margin is higher
The "tablet PC" space were Windows (proper) lives from a cost of production standpoint is likely going down while prices remain much higher than the "tablet" space.

All sinking money into Windows RT would do is eat into their Droid products market. Their is no reason to do it.

Don't put new wine into old wineskins

[Marcion]

Until very recently computing has all been utilising the benefits of this year's more powerful and more resource hungry x86 processor. Relatively cheap laptops are more powerful than supercomputers 15 years ago but the user experience is not particularly more responsive because software gets increasingly bloated.

ARM devices are really a different proposition, on the plus side they have no moving parts and a long battery life, however they are a very different architecture to x86, and making the OS perform well requires lots of differences. Linux (and therefore android too) was always built to be a modular system and one thing it does well is support different platforms with many compatible but swappable components at every level. The world's top supercomputers and the £25 Raspberry Pi both happily run Linux.

Windows is very different. It is a set of very tightly integrated libraries, which has its benefits, but they all need to be scaled down to work on ARM, you cannot just swap out some resource hungry component for some open source project because the system is so interdependent. Scaling down software is much harder than scaling it up.

Therefore I am not suprised that Samsung found Windows' ARM version slow and resource hungry. Just because Windows dominated the x86 era, it does not mean it will be suitable for the new and disruptive ARM age.