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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
Better $199.00 from a school than $0.00 from the dumpster.
* Carthago Delenda Est *
How did selling the Apple ][ to schools hurt Apple exactly?
[citation needed] You know, actual evidence.
Michael dell suggesting they wind down the company and pay the money back to the investors does not count?
You don't remember Apple nearly dying when those kids started to become consumers in their own right?
But now you're talking about the 90's and the Mac. The Apple ][ in the 80's was a completely different story.
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
Yep.
At $49, I might buy one. At $199, I still expect to get something for my money. I discovered this recently when I bought a Chromebook on a whim. It was back in the box and returned in a few days. I thought I wouldn't care if it was just a toy at that price but I was wrong. I spent another $105 to get a quad-core 17.3" laptop and installed Chrome on it. Gives me the Chrome experience in addition to being able to do all kinds of other stuff.
Remembering the time when Apple was pushing Apple II's in schools, I sure don't recall kids "hating it" because they felt "forced to use something" --- for the majority of kids, it was their first and only opportunity to use a computer at all. Playing those Apple II games was something new and exciting, that they'd be unlikely to have access to at home (without both well-off and technologically cutting-edge parents).
In this case, however, I agree with you --- a lot of kids (pretty much all of them from a middle class socioeconomic background) will already have seen better computers (or even have one in their pocket). Dumping crappy cheap tech on schools for a tax writeoff and some publicity isn't particularly going to be awe-inspiring for the kids. But, it will stall school administrations from considering switching to less Microsoft-centric platforms for at least a few more years; and, even if the kids don't like it, they'll be blocked from learning much about alternatives when they have to do classwork in Microsoft Office instead of [insert superior alternatives here].
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 $1000. At that price what is the incentive to buy it? You can buy a convertible ultra book for just a few dollars more.
"The problem with socialism is eventually you run out of other people's money" - Thatcher.
A LOT of kids explicitly wanted an Apple II in the 80's. It was THE machine to get at the time before the PC boom happened. But I can understand if you had to use them in the 90's. Unless it was a IIgs, that one was actually kind of OK.
Dumping 3rd rate technology in schools, in the hopes that children cannot tell the level of substandard they are presented with.
Whether they are "substandard" or not, depends on what the children do with them. I.e. whether they work within the (assumed) confines of the technology, or are inspired to set and achieve their own limits.
There was a time when geeks were defined by taking whatever was at hand and adapting/extending it to whatever their imaginations came up with. Now ./ is overrun with crabby fanbois who define geek as "good at XBox even though M$ is teh suxxor", apparently. Oh well.
I remember kids hating them because they were outdated and we were forced to use them. This was likely because schools kept them a long time. Also because we were kids, who always hate whatever authority suggests they do.
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
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.
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
The funny part of this is that you don't even realize or acknowledge the fact that Macs are in fact a product of the 80s.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
Did they? Because I went to high school during that time period, and it's my recollection that every geek wanted an Apple.
Most of them ended up with Commodores, or worse.
Yep.
At $49, I might buy one. At $199, I still expect to get something for my money. I discovered this recently when I bought a Chromebook on a whim. It was back in the box and returned in a few days. I thought I wouldn't care if it was just a toy at that price but I was wrong. I spent another $105 to get a quad-core 17.3" laptop and installed Chrome on it. Gives me the Chrome experience in addition to being able to do all kinds of other stuff.
Yeah, but this isn't offered to you, it's to schools. Schools will buy them, because they'll think they are getting a big fat deal. Then IT people in schools will point out what a pain they are to do anything with, but with enough tar or mortar could be used to patch holes in the roof.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
Fair enough; I suspect you're right that, once Apple II's were well past their expiration date, playing 'Number Munchers' and 'Oregon Trail' wouldn't seem so cool to kids with access to a Nintendo at home (or at least at a friend's house). Of course, hating what authority tells you to do is sometimes quite an incentive to get interested in what even outdated hardware can do --- once you learn more about operating computers in the school computer lab than your teachers know, you can cause all sorts of amusing troubles for authority. Perhaps Microsoft will unintentionally drive a new generation of kids to enthusiasm for jailbreaking and hacking administrative access controls; perhaps a better outcome than teaching kids to be happily complacent towards the corporate authoritarianism embedded in their newest shiny smartphone doodads.
We use a recording of Windows RT to lure the tablets into Lake Michigan?
Seems feasible.
crazy dynamite monkey
Without x86 legacy applications, there just isn't that much reason to bother with Windows.
On the other hand, pretty much anything available for Linux is available as source and can be rebuilt for alternative platforms. If not by the author than by some interested 3rd party.
Windows on ARM is a shadow of it's x86 variant.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
Casio invented and owned the graphing calculator market until the early 90's before TI stepped in and started heavily promoting their own offerings to teachers. Look where Casio is against TI today.
I am becoming gerund, destroyer of verbs.
This is because there is no market for graphing calculators outside of what the school requires.
This is why a Ti-83 still costs $100 even though it could be replaced by a $50 china tablet or something even cheaper.
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.
We had Apple ][ computers in elementary school. When I became a consumer, we had whitebox PCs and iMacs.
There's a significant time lag in there that you don't seem to have accounted for. The Apple ][ didn't do the damage, the iMac and lockdown did.
For large sets, this will be our guide even unto death, for the LORD will work for each type of data it is applied to...
For what it's worth, I managed to get everything done without being forced to use Office to do it. My teachers didn't necessarily love me for it (more work for them), but they supported it by not tossing my work in the trash...
For large sets, this will be our guide even unto death, for the LORD will work for each type of data it is applied to...
... and that's why I have a TI-84 Silver, 10 years later? That I actually use?
For large sets, this will be our guide even unto death, for the LORD will work for each type of data it is applied to...
I would have been glad to have one... if not for the bootloader lockdown bullshit.
Foot, meet bullet.
For large sets, this will be our guide even unto death, for the LORD will work for each type of data it is applied to...
Before they can purchase an RT they will have to have a list of programs that they need that run on a surface RT.
No programs.
No purchase.
Don't know something? Look it up. Still don't know? Then ask.
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.
Show me a graphing calculator with a 10" screen.
My question is just as nonsensical as yours.
And the worms ate into his brain.
Not with the bios-enforced bootloader lockdown, you won't.
For large sets, this will be our guide even unto death, for the LORD will work for each type of data it is applied to...
Dumping: selling at below the cost of manufacture.
There are two types of people in the world: Those who crave closure
I wish my school had been donated Apple II computers, we got Commodore Pets with tape drives.
"The Adobe Updater must update itself before it can check for updates. Would you like to update the Adobe Updater now?"
Unless it was a IIgs, that one was actually kind of OK.
Not quite an Amiga. Not quite a Macintosh.
Well, Surface may or may not be crappy, but all kids these days have already got their allegiance to ipad/iphone or Android, and dumping Surface at a slight discount is not necessarily going to do much for them. Hey, but if I were them, I'd probably try it too. Worth a shot. But my guess is MS will get bored with this quickly like they do with most of their ideas that don't generate instant cash, and that will be that.
It was the abysmal quality control at Apple prior to Steve Jobs coming back that caused even die-hard Apple lovers to start buying PCs when their 3rd shipment of the same computer was DOA (my boss at the time found herself exactly here).
Peter predicted that you would "deliberately forget" creation 2000 years ago...
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.
Speaking as someone who had a //e. And not just any //e mine had a Transwarp, a Cider 10M Hard Drive, a Hayes Modem, and an 1M extended 80 col card. My //e was mackin. Further I learned a lot about computers from that system. However that came from my own personal learning and...
Not from my school which had a room full of //e's that were not used really at all. If you are in a room of computers but your teacher/professor does not let you interact with them, or further teach you anything meaningful about how to further your knowledge about computers then they might as well be door stops.
The idea that you can dump a bunch of hardware on schools and make it relevant has been proven ineffectual. I would venture to say that an industry would have to back it up with TON more of resources to make that investment pay off. That MS is about to have to dump a TON of resources into the XBone to make that even break even makes me wonder if they are going to fight a two front war at this point.
Really, I know what I'm doing...Ohhhh, look at the shiny buttons!
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
Schools are just never going to have up to date computers, they don't even have budget to hire enough teachers.
Personally I think it's all wasted money anyway. Kids to not need to use computers in elementary schools. The Apple ][ was welcomed at the time because there was a lot of fear at the time that no one could learn computers unless they learned it at a very early age and Apple played off of those fears. There was hype about computer based education, and 40 years later it still doesn't exist in any reasonable form. The truth is that you can learn how to use computer in college without being handicapped, and many kids already have access to computers at home anyway. Stick a few in the library for those kids who don't have access to one, but you don't need them in the class room.
The kids are really not learning anything from having access to the computers anyway. Sure they aren't scared of the mouse like grandma is but that's not because the computer is in the school.
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
[humor needed] You know, an actual funny bone, to prevent you from taking every comment too seriously.
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".
"Nice cafeteria tray you have. I especially like the glowy rainbow tiles. Oops, watch the gravy there."
Table-ized A.I.
I was of that generation. I grew up with an Apple IIe. My first Mac was in college - I had a Centris 650 and it was very nice. Then I got a PowerBook 5300cs, and the only nice thing I can say about it was that Apple kept fixing it, eventually extending the warranty for 7 years IIRC. After that debacle, my next computer was a cheap PC (Cyrix processor!). Ever since, I've gone with a mix of Macs and PCs.
Peter predicted that you would "deliberately forget" creation 2000 years ago...
That's why I worship him instead of Jesus.
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
I found the battery life to be approximately 3.5 months. Just long enough to get you half way through your final exam. . .
I took to swapping batteries just before exams.
Kids got Commodore-64s instead. Same processor as the Apple II, not as open. But the schematic diagram of the C-64 was right there in the back pages of the user manual that shipped with every commie. Apple could/should have made a cheap entry-level machine to compete with the commie, but it would have cannibalized their existing product line.
By that point anybody interested in computers had a C-64 at home, which did everything the Apple II did that they wanted, for far less.
$300 today will get you a netbook that has a dual core AMD processor, Nvidia graphics, and can be populated with 8 GB of RAM. The earlier netbooks really stunk (the ones with Atom processors that Microsoft wouldn't provide OEM Windows for if it was possible to put more than 1G of RAM in) but the current line is quite usable. Look at the Acer Aspire One as an example.
Hey, that's unfair: Linux actually has some apps!
Circumcision is child abuse.
Sorry to burst your bubble, AC, but I've had mine since it launched in the US and I use it every day.
Most linux users don't know this, but the man pages were named after Chuck Norris. Chuck Norris fsck'ing hates noobs!
Perhaps everyone interested in computers with parents willing and (financially) able to support that interest... but, in reality, for the overwhelming majority of kids, the Apple II in school (or other school computer lab device) was their first and only chance to use a computer (to even find out if they were interested). A C64 at $595 in 1982 is equivalent to ~$1400 today (depending on how you inflation adjust) --- a pretty hefty chunk of money for a "kid's toy" in a world before computer use would be widely recognized by the general public as a vital skill.
"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.
My apologies, you're right.
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
Without x86 legacy applications, there just isn't that much reason to bother with Windows.
So true. At least one company knows the value of backwards compatibility (and it's not Apple).
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
It sounds all dirty when you call it a commie :D
No, it's a bit more insidious than that. School administrators, even in rural midwestern towns, are mandating that students rent tablets (like iPads*) for school. But, as outlandishly expensive as iPads can be (compared to Android tablets), obviously Surface RT prices are even more galling. The obvious answer then is to undercut iPads and at least be price competitive with Android tablets. Add to that the promise of "it's like a laptop" and "comes with MS Office", and you'd be hard pressed to not see plenty of schools pushing for such devices.
*Yea, as ridiculous as that. You'd think they'd go for Android tablets, if anything, to be cheaper for everyone concerned. I guess schools may be delusional and think those iPads are actually secure wall gardens, perfect for controlling their rented-out property. Personally, I think tablets for every student is outright an absurd idea even if they were free. They're simply too much of a distraction for adults, let alone for children. Beyond that, I'm generally against the idea of just about any company dumping (and possibly at all selling) their branded products at schools precisely because it's designed to create life-long lock-in. I mean, why else would MS or Apple or whatever push for schools to use their products, possibly even selling at a loss? Now, if the Gates Foundation were doing such a thing...I'd still be suspicious because I don't see the Surface RT as the right tool for the job, anyways.
Eurohacker European paranoia, gun rights, and h
Microsoft does not have "the cool".
Select from tblFriends where interesting >= 4;
Ah, but the Chromebook would have given you portability and better battery life...
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.