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Falling Windows RT Tablet Prices Signify Slow Adoption
angry tapir writes "Prices of Windows RT devices have started falling, signaling an attempt by PC makers to quickly clear out stock after poor adoption of tablets and convertibles with the operating system. Microsoft released Windows RT for ARM-based devices and Windows 8 for Intel-based devices in October last year. The price drop is an acknowledgment that Windows RT has failed, analysts claim. Though Microsoft has not publicly acknowledged the failure of Windows RT, there is already growing concern about the fate of the OS. IDC earlier this month said that Windows RT tablet shipments have been poor, and that consumers have not bought into 'Windows RT's value proposition.' PC and chip makers have acknowledged poor adoption of the operating system. Nvidia's CEO, Jen-Hsun Huang, last month said he was disappointed with the poor response to Windows RT, and Acer executives have said that Microsoft needs to improve the usability of RT."
1999: Windows ME, Mostly Excrement
2007: Windows VISTA, Vastly Improved Subpar Total Ass_shit
2012: Windows RT, Royal Trash
2013: Windows BLUE, ?
Fill in the blank!
Tomorrow is another day...
No, I wouldn't buy one either. But the inconsistency of the technical press is quite entertaining.
Apple strips most of the functionality out of OS X, erects a walled garden around the system, dumps it onto an ARM-based tablet and, voila, a cool, hip, trendy iPad that the critics adore.
Microsoft strips a small part of the functionality out of Windows, erects a walled garden around the system, dumps it onto an ARM-based tablet and, voila, a vile, loathed RT device that the critics lambast for being dumbed down and failing to run Excel macros.
While I'm no Apple fan, you've missed the point that Apple and Android both got there a long time before Microsoft. Microsoft is a late contender for the tablet/phone markets, and in order to succeed they needed an edge over the devices that were already available.
Apple has a cult following and so you'd be hard pressed to convert a lot of the Apple consumers away to any other platform. A good proportion of Apple users buy Apple hardware because its got an Apple logo on it - they don't care about the functionality so much as the "cool factor" of owning an Apple device. So in some respects, MS was always going to struggle to make significant inroads into the core iOS userbase, no matter what they came out with.
Android has cornered the "everything else" market - people who don't care about the supposed Apple "cool factor" are going to be drawn to Android largely because its a hell of a lot cheaper than Apple; but also there is the openness of the platform which is agreeable to a lot of the more techy consumers.
On the whole, there isn't actually a huge amount to choose between iOS, Android and Windows RT - they all do basically the same job; the vast majority of people don't know or care about vendor lockin and the only reason Apple can sell at such a high price is because they are Apple and have the affore mentioned cult status.
So Microsoft have pitched their Windows RT devices at a prices similar to iOS devices. People who buy Apple kit at the inflated prices that Apple charge will continue to do that because its Apple... The rest of the population will compare Apple, MS and Android and conclude that since they are all basically the same they may as well go for the cheaper one so MS has lost that part of the market too.
Who's going to buy MS's devices? Well, corporates would love tablets and phones that integrate well into their networks (and trust me, iOS and Android really don't - they feel, at best, extremely half arsed as soon as you put them on a corporate network). So The "edge" MS have is the corporates... However, they decided to leave all the "pro" stuff out of Windows RT - it actually won't integrate into the corporate networks any better than iOS and Android; so there they've gone and lost the corporates too.
Who's left? The only people I can see who are going to buy an MS device are people who haven't actually looked to see what else is available on the market. If MS had got there first, then I'm sure their current Windows RT offering would be doing very well indeed, but since they didn't they need to offer some kind of edge to sway people from the established platforms, and as far as I can see they just haven't done that.
(I should add that, unfortunately, there are people, even in a corporate environment, who buy shiny kit without researching if it will actually do what they want. For example, one of my customers has recently bought a load of Chromebooks without consulting with any IT staff... they were shocked when they discovered that all their users would need Google accounts and be expected to store everything in the cloud. The term "well duhh" sprang to mind.)
http://blog.nexusuk.org