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Microsoft To Start Dumping Surface RT To Schools For $199
onyxruby writes "In a move that will remind many of Apple in the '80s, Microsoft is going to start dumping Surface RT computers to educational institutions. In an effort to try to gain mindshare for their struggling Surface RT platform, Microsoft is giving away 10,000 Surface RTs to teachers through the International Society for Technology in Education. They're also preparing to offer $199 Surface RTs to K12 and higher education institutions. The strategy of flooding the educational market was quite successful for Apple. Unfortunately for Microsoft, today's computers require management and the Surface RT presents significant management challenges in terms of the inability to join the computer to a domain or available management tools."
How would this remind people of Apple in the 80s? The Apple II was not a dud product being price dumped to clear inventory.
pick up a bunch of Surface tablets, and put Linux or Android on them
This will be as bad for it as it was for Apple. Kids will think of Surface RT as that stupid thing the teachers make them use and how inferior it is to whatever they have at home or whatever smart device they normally use.
Making kids use something is a sure fire way to get them to hate it.
Better $199.00 from a school than $0.00 from the dumpster.
* Carthago Delenda Est *
No informed person wanted that Surface RTard anyway.
No, dumping would be $49, at $199 it's still a big fat PASS.
Yeah, just . . . that. Overpriced.
Is the key word... Worthless pieces of crap.
Dumping 3rd rate technology in schools, in the hopes that children cannot tell the level of substandard they are presented with.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
Don't allow Microsoft to take a dump over the children and turn them into their obedient license buyers, only-install-software-permitted-by-Microsoft serfs. They cannot even install linux on it as it's UEFI Bios only allows Windows be installed. $200 is what a ARM laptop costs, anyway, they are not doing anybody a favor.
Microsoft, nobody wants your crap. Go fix your crap instead of trying to tell everyone how great it is.
You fucked up. Now go back to work and fix it. Instead of fucking around.
If Microsoft was smart about it they'd give Maddog a call and see if he would like some thin clients for his new high rise servers.
"A person is smart. People are dumb, panicky dangerous animals and you know it." - K
not possible, UEFI Bios is locked to install Windows only
None of the links posted say anything about "dumping", just discounts. I don't like Microsoft as much as the next neckbeard wearing unix sysadmin, however I don't see how this qualifies as dumping at all. Even the anti-MS troll stories are getting pathetic on /. these days.
May God have mercy on their souls.
What they did was confuse the hell out of people. At first Microsoft was touting a tablet that could run Windows Apps called the surface. What they meant was the Surface pro. Instead the device that got released first was the RT and it still had the name "windows". Most people looking at them, and I know of one business that bought a couple, did so thinking they could run existing windows programs. They got 'em home and learned they couldn't.
At least Apple makes it clear that while underneath the hood, both MacOS and iOS share many of the same parts, they are entirely different OS's designed for different purposes. Microsoft failed to do that with the Surface.
The next problem is that the Surface Pro is $1000. At that price what is the incentive to buy it? You can buy a convertible ultra book for just a few dollars more.
"The problem with socialism is eventually you run out of other people's money" - Thatcher.
Dumping 3rd rate technology in schools, in the hopes that children cannot tell the level of substandard they are presented with.
Whether they are "substandard" or not, depends on what the children do with them. I.e. whether they work within the (assumed) confines of the technology, or are inspired to set and achieve their own limits.
There was a time when geeks were defined by taking whatever was at hand and adapting/extending it to whatever their imaginations came up with. Now ./ is overrun with crabby fanbois who define geek as "good at XBox even though M$ is teh suxxor", apparently. Oh well.
Then get back to me.
Who cares about what MS communicates in their PR anymore. Kids already have iOS or Android powered computers in their pockets. That's where all their apps and pals are too.
I love all these people replying that it's impossible. Every major hardware DRM scheme that has been placed into consumer devices has been cracked.
The only reason why the RT might be different is that it's so unpopular that nobody really cares to try.
You can buy *new* netbooks that actually run Windows applications for around that much. For the average person, having an RT is about the same as having a Linux netbook -- the only apps you're likely to run are the ones that come with it, and realistically, you're only going to use it for web browsing.
This is not worth $200.
Does Microsoft think we'll pay extra just for the logo? They're the wrong company for that.
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
It comes with Office, so it's a business computer that can also play the tablet game, right?
Except that there's no Outlook. Try getting business done without that.
And you can't join a domain. That goes hand-in-hand with the above.
And most critical to anyone who just wants to get work done: it's not x86-compatible, and you're limited to Windows Store apps.
Who the hell came up with this horrible hodgepodge of an OS? And who expected anyone to pay a premium price for it? They'll be lucky if they can get these things to move even for $200!
Man is the animal that laughs.
And occasionally whores for Karma.
Haven't we seen this movie ending before?
I was recently running a poll, and I found out that at least 20% of our department faculty own a Surface tablet of one sort or another - and that was before this move was announced. 20% of our faculty, and that's assuming none of the non-responders own a Surface.
I was seriously shocked. Android and iOS tablets are apparently less popular than Surface among our EE faculty. We've got some pretty close ties to Microsoft, but that is still surprising.
#DeleteChrome
of Microsoft Surface in everyone's minds in now $199?
It probably does.
I'm probably one of the few on here who have used an RT. Picked one up for $99 + keyboard at TechEd, and used it all week at the conference to take notes/surf/do work. Honestly, for your basic user who wants surfing/word docs, it's perfectly fine.
Also - I have an iPad that I love, but I couldn't dream of doing the work I was doing on the surface. The desktop mode is very nice, plus it just seems more workable when I can VPN in just like my PC at home. When comparing iPad to Surface for doing actual work, it's not event close, the Surface wins by a landslide.
What exactly is the need for management on a tablet that can only run approved apps, which is hard for students to mess up? If anything, today's mobile devices with their walled garden appstores and cloud backup should require less maintenance.
Good I was looking to replace my HP Touchpad.
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
Microsoft reverses the old adage. The tablet initiative is one leg of Microsoft's tripod of company sinking disasters. The other legs are Windows 8 and the NSA spy box, the Xbox One.
Obviously, if the idea behind the tablet was worth a damn, MS would sell them off cheap in the general marketplace, and build up a user-support base. It cannot use the excuse that this would conflict with the second generation of MS tablets due later this year, because the Android market happily sees very cheap tablets selling side-by-side with much more expensive brands. The Tegra 3 in the Surface RT is an unremarkable SoC in today's ARM tablet market (slower than all the high end Chinese parts found in tablets selling today well under $150).
The $199 price point should be the price point of the second generation Surface Pro tablets build using AMD's Temash part, but Microsoft is going to be asking three times this price, ensuring the second generation sink even faster than the first.
Remember, that although a complete build (with all dlls) of Windows 8 is installed on each ARM tablet, Microsoft officially cripples access to the OS, so that all third-party apps are forced to use the useless, broken Metro interface. The tablet can be hacked to gain full Windows functionality, and MS dev kits can be used to create standard Windows apps compiled for ARM, but the user base is so tiny, no-one bothers.
The market has Android (going from strength to strength) and iOS for sheep who want their hardware/software locked down by the manufacturer. The market doesn't even need a third mobile OS. It would be like a third microprocessor architecture competing with ARM and x86- an un-needed and useless complication that simply confuses the situation, works to increase development costs, and provides no advantage to the end user.
Microsoft had one shot. To release a full Windows OS (even if it had a mobile shell front end) on a reasonably priced ARM tablet, to directly compete with those from companies like Amazon and Google. The hardware is supposed to be a loss leader that builds up a user base for online services, like a software store. Instead, Microsoft chose to take a massive (we are talking billions here) pay-off from Intel to support Intel's hopeless 'ultrabook' initiative, and to sabotage the market for low cost ARM based Windows devices.
Microsoft no longer cares about its users to ANY degree. It only cares about the size of the cheque from Intel, or the prestige and power gained from working with the NSA, and putting a spy device into the homes of millions of ordinary Americans. Render to Microsoft what is Microsoft's. Disgust, distrust, despite.
We use a recording of Windows RT to lure the tablets into Lake Michigan?
Seems feasible.
crazy dynamite monkey
MS should create an emulation layer that allows RT to natively run Android apps. That will solve the chicken and egg issue of limited app availability and make their platform a more compelling offering.
I am becoming gerund, destroyer of verbs.
Isn't attempting to flood a market with a device being charged at sub-standard pricing to subvert a competitor, like, illegal?
I thought this was covered by anti-dumping laws.
If they're running Win8 then I can kind of understand it. WinRT not so much...
android is out of the MS app store and has 3rd party apps so that is out.
Maybe I'm getting old, but when did "dumping ... to ..." become a valid phrase?
TFA says "offering schools/colleges $199 Surface RT Tablets"... how does one turn "offering" into "dumping"?
Treat every day like it's your last; delete your browser cache before going to bed.
I can feed it to my dog. ...and when he 'reboots', my other dog will try to eat it.
The government which is strong enough to protect you from everything is strong enough to take everything from you.
They should sell the RT for $99, just like the HP tablet, and build a user base. I would buy a Surface RT if it was $99, and I don't even like tablets.
If telephones are outlawed, then only outlaws will have telephones.
Or how massive of a failure it was when Microsoft did it with Office to dislodge Wordperfect & Lotus 123?
Good. Do that with your other junk too. Be regular, stay regular.
So give my kid a surface RT. I will be nice and provide the hockey stick he will need to use it correctly. Can anyone say slapshot.
Before the Surface RT came out there was quite a bit of excitement and anticipation that it would be priced at $199. So now that that price if finally a reality let's not call it "dumping". Just call it a great deal.
There is a jailbreak that allows running arbitrary Windows desktop-based programs on a Surface RT - if you recompile for ARM. It even allows kernel-mode drivers. Microsoft still hasn't fixed it, because it's not a security hole in the traditional sense--it requires Administrator privileges.
Because it is possible to make a jailbreak that automatically runs soon after startup, and it is possible to use the jailbreak to load a kernel driver, it is possible to boot up another OS by doing the equivalent of a kexec(). The problem is merely that nobody has done it.
I could write the code to do the kexec(), but I have no clue how to build a Linux kernel, let alone figure out how to interface with the hardware devices. If anyone wants to do that part, which I think is the hard part, let me know. =)
"Screw Sun, cross-platform will never work. Let's move on and steal the Java language." - Visual J++ Product Manager
It is common to estimate sales rates when pricing is impacted by QUANTITY especially in a tightly contested market with thin margins (that is, unless you have a huge quantity discount allowing your margins to be high.)
Such things are the reason why small players don't enter into such markets, they cost more and provide less with lower margins due to low production runs.
Marketing, promotion, and possibly a tax write off - WHILE also maintaining sales levels. For marketing it doubles as PR and provides better statistics on units sold etc.
Democracy Now! - uncensored, anti-establishment news
This isn't news. It's been MS strategy for ages to give discounts to public and private organizations. It's a fine strategy. and it's not like Apple in the 80's because Apple software back then didn't run on a thousand different devices from a thousand different vendors, each potentially offering different features than the others, without breaking my existing software "ecosystem".
When Microsoft sells a thing at or near cost, /. calls it dumping. When Google sells a thing (Nexus tablets), at or below cost it's called smart business.
"Nice cafeteria tray you have. I especially like the glowy rainbow tiles. Oops, watch the gravy there."
Table-ized A.I.
What was this jibberish meant to say? And how were you modded up?
is what you need when you're in school. And Surface RT lacks the stylus support that the pro version has, making it rather useless.
Funny, I don't remember anybody cracking the bootloader on my old Droid X...
"The strategy of flooding the educational market was quite successful for Apple."
Ummm it was a disaster that put Windows in charge of all home markets in the 90's actually.
"Unfortunately for Microsoft, today's computers require management and the Surface RT presents significant management challenges in terms of the inability to join the computer to a domain"
At my organization we have to unfortunately deal with managing a couple thousand ipads. IT always gives our Apple rep a hard time about the shortcomings of the ipad and it being a consumer device trying to work in a corporate environment. Things like they can't really be managed period because users can just hard reset and easily wipe management profiles, and things like you can't join ipads to a domain. Any Apple rep will dismiss these concerns as non-issues so it is funny to see these types of issues be an issue with the MS haters when it comes to the surface. Not defending the RT it is pretty lame, although the Surface Pro is the best mobile device I have owned for the things I need to accomplish every day.
Chromebooks make better sense than either in a school environment however. They can be managed easily and are affordable to replace. ipads and Surfaces break like a mofo when dropped compared to other devices and it happens all the time when these devices are handed out to kids in schools and is a huge expense in labor and repair/replacement costs. Not to mention that you can easily buy more than two Chromebooks for every ipad or retail priced surface which is a better value for the taxpayers who actually pay for this stuff. I would rather purchase Chromebooks all day any day over reduced price RTs or ipads for sure.
Joe Dragon is always rambling on with some incoherent stuff. I don't know if he isn't a native English speaker or if his grammar is just that bad but whatever it is, I think he has some alt accounts stackin up mod points to dump on himself. The more incoherant the post, the higher it gets modded and I call him out every time.
Microsoft does not have "the cool".
Select from tblFriends where interesting >= 4;
They should rather start bundling Surface RT in baby/toy stores. Kids these days are starting early... Very early.
I think the schools should be paid more than $199 per RT.
Home-built cards on wire wrap boards.
And the computer came with a full set of schematics.
Unfortunately, one of the clock phases was missing on the expansion connector.
Linux gets given away for FREE, where's the outrage there? Oh I forgot, Linux hypocritically gets a pass from the Zealots.
In a blow to Microsoft, Apple wins $30M LA school iPad contract
The choice of words is a little different when it an Apple product, isn't it????
But no media BIAS, of course not.