Slashdot Mirror
Microsoft May Finally Put Windows RT Out To Pasture
onyxruby writes "Microsoft may finally be ready to put Windows RT out to pasture. After ignoring pundits, the public, and a staggering $900 writedown, the subsequent lack of sales for the second edition of the RT have finally gotten the message through. Speaking at a UBS seminar, Microsoft VP Julie Larson-Green said, 'It just didn't do everything that you expected Windows to do. So there's been a lot of talk about it should have been a rebranding. We should not have called it Windows (.DOCX). How should we have made it more differentiated? I think over time you'll see us continue to differentiate it more. We have the Windows Phone OS. We have Windows RT and we have full Windows. We're not going to have three.'"
What are you talking about? It still says "$900 writedown".
BS, dual boot is a minor feature that very few would use and would be a blip on the radar as far as sales go. The killer was the lack of apps, the locked down nature of the installed OS combined with general confusion.
tech.slashdot.org still has the $900, hardware.slashdot.org story has the $900M
An x86 mobile phone already is a thing.
This isn't shocking. They had branding problems by calling it Windows. It's near impossible to explain the difference to a non-technical user. The end result is that Microsoft will no longer have any ARM tablets. This will mean, for a little while at least, their tablet hardware will be more expensive and drain batteries faster. Not exactly traits that will have them dominate the tablet market. They might be able to get users that want or need to run Windows applications on a tablet, but that's not a large percentage of the tablet market.
Ask customers of the Zune, music covered by PlaysForSure, the Kin and various other products that I'm sure Microsoft thoroughly supported after abandoning them.
The whole "tablet" thing is confusing. I have a Fujitsu tablet that runs Windows 7, has a keyboard but also operates as a slate with a stylus and active digitizer. Tablets used to be laptops with an active or passive digitizer and possibly a keyboard, then the iPad came along and now tablets are two different things, with a variety of operating systems and capabilities. It's one thing for techies to sort through it, but quite another for the average consumer.
So you have a device that's not a phone, and not a laptop. Some customers are going to want it to function more like the laptop, with a full operating system and similar capabilities. Others may want it to work more like a phone, with a mobile, small-device oriented, simplified operating system. Who is to say which is best, or that either is best? Isn't that the failure of RT? It's neither, but tries to offer a middle-ground?
Vista, of course - a solid failure.
Absolute BS. Microsoft wanted the locked-down environment in order to force users to their app store, so that they'd get a 30% cut like Apple and Google do.
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz