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

[hairyfeet]

Actually its such a failwhale I seriously doubt it'll even get third, more likely a distant fourth. first will be either iOS or Android 4, next will be the one of those two who doesn't have the top spot that week, followed by Android 2.x which while starting to finally die out still has a pretty good share, and finally MSFT WinRT. Honestly if you count the Symbian units still being sold most likely MSFT would make fifth since the sales of Surface are so bad they had to cut their order in half and it looks like they sold less than a million units for the fourth quarter, that is just terrible numbers.

Seriously how many negative indicators is it gonna take for the board to put down the crack pipe and fire the Ballmernator? The man has wasted something like 40 BILLION in the past 6 years on failed ventures, his few successes certainly haven't even wiped all the red ink from his bad moves, much less made a profit, honestly they would have had a better return with no strategy at all, just putting the money into T-Bills or blue chip stocks. When even Forbes is calling the 00s "MSFT's lost decade" and naming the Ballmernator worst CEO, how much more proof do you really need? the man is an unmitigated disaster and I bet if you compared how much money the Pepsi guy lost for Apple with what Ballmer has blown on harebrained ideas like Zune, Kin, Sidekick, Bing, etc Ballmer would make the Pepsi guy look like Steve jobs, he is THAT bad.

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.

I heard...

[Anonymous Coward]

I heard they'd cost an ARM and a leg...

No surprise

[blind biker]

You don't become the leading smartphone manufacturer by being a sucker.

Re:interesting...

[sribe]

Funny the Slashdot community skipped right over the news Microsoft sold 60 million licenses so far. this place really is the fox news of tech.

Because:

1) That's actually a low rate for Windows adoption;

2) More importantly, it provides no information at all on sales of Windows RT tablets.

Re:Poor naming

[DMiax]

you often need to drill down to the 'tech specs' page when looking at tablets in order to tell whether it has a useful OS or not.

Can't you just check if it says "Windows" on the cover?

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.

Re:Those are OEM sales

[Billly Gates]

OEM buys the licenses beforehand.

All MS has to do is say "Ok, instead of having 1 months supply of Windows 8 licenses I need you to buy 5 months ahead of time!"

Then MS releases a press release saying "OMG DEMAND FOR WINDOWS 8 WENT UP 500%!" Intentionally, exgerated of course but that is my point. We all know the accounting tricks of Vista numbers where people and businesses bought them but wiped them and downgraded to XP.

Online website counters are the real way to predict adoption. If anyone is interested in the real number of people *actually using* windows 8 click here from statcounter who checks millions of websites each day? Windows 8 was 2% the last I looked. In comparison Windows 7 jumped 3x more in the same time period 3 years ago!

In otherwords it is a dud.