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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.'"
Microsoft has developed a habit of killing every new product the second it runs into a little difficulty, and now wonders why consumers don't want to risk their money on new Microsoft products that will probably be dead in a year.
What microsoft SHOULD have done is what Google and Apple did and basically made "Windows Tablet" based on the Windows Phone OS. So they would have had x86 machines running Windows 8 with a normal desktop OS (possibly with a few enhancements to make it run better on x86 tablets) then ARM devices (phone and tablet) running the Windows Phone codebase and supporting the Windows Phone interface and apps.
project management.
The product is called "Windows." Windows are static things. They are embedded into walls. They provide an unmoving portal into another space.
A monitor on your desktop behaves like a window in some sense. It is always in the same place. You sit and you look at it.
Windows Phone and Windows RT just don't make sense for mobile devices, and provide a kind of complacency to project vision and the wrong idea (unpalatable) to consumers looking for mobile devices.
MS should call the mobile product something mobile:
MS Pathways
MS Journeys
MS Passages
MS Ways
MS Compass
MS Latitude
Then they should focus relentlessly on small-screen/long-battery/mobile UX for the mobile system; design toward the lightweight, mobile ethos of the new name, and market it relentlessly not as "the same as windows" but in fact as exactly different from it.
MS Windows in your office
MS Compass for going places
"Because you're not always sitting still.
"Busy people do more than sit by Windows."
I'm not saying that the marketing is the product; we all know that's ridiculous and leads exactly to a product fail (mismatched expectations vs. reality). I'm saying that if MS was as marketing-led as they ought to have been, they'd do the field research to know what mobile users need (field research they clearly haven't done well) and target the product to those needs, as well as the marketing campaign.
Who needs Windows in their pocket on the street? Nobody. Windows belong inside walls.
Same thing goes for the hardware product. "Surface?" Sounds static and architectural. The opposite of mobility. You can see that they themselves imagined the product this way based on what was shipped out the door. Come up with something lightweight and mobile.
The Microsoft Dispatch.
The Microsoft Portfolio.
The Microsoft Movement (tablet) and Microsoft Velocity (phone).
These are not great ideas yet, but they're light years ahead of "Windows" and "Surface" for a mobile device that ends up acting just like a "Window" or a "Surface."
STOP . AMERICA . NOW
Nonsense.
The problem was simple and obvious. It was called "Windows", but when Joe Schmoe tried to install a windows application on it, it wouldn't run.
The "geek" market isn't even a statistical blip on the radar of market share nowadays.
I do not fail; I succeed at finding out what does not work.
Slashdot also knew the iPod, iPhone, and iPad were all going to be flops. I don't trust any tech predictions that originate from here.