
Microsoft's ARM blunder: Why Windows RT was DOA - bane
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/01/18/7_reasons_windows_rt_was_doa/print.html
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brudgers
If Microsoft was a B2C company, the article would be spot on. They are not,
however, Apple. They are primarily B2B. Windows didn't come to dominate the
desktop because consumers loved it. It dominates because it provides a value
proposition to businesses. Success with consumers is part of that value
proposition, and one of the things which gives it an advantage over Linux.

RT is a long term strategy. It's not a tablet OS. It's the phone too, just not
yet, fully.It's not targeted at consumers. It's targeted at enterprise.

As a B2C company, Apple will not offer a roadmap or backward compatibility.
Google being an advertising agency, will always seek to read one's data.
Microsoft knows what it is.

~~~
kabdib
Xbox is "B2C", in a very big way.

The impression I got was that it was intended for consumers. Why else would
you only sell it in a Microsoft store? (I did see one in a Best Buy. It was
buried in with the other tablets, while there was a shining white table with
iPads a few feet away, with actual people around it fondling the merchandise).

It's true that MS did give most of their full-time employees free Surfaces. I
assumed this was to promote internal use, and hey, who doesn't like free
stuff?

The hardware is great, but the Windows group really, honestly didn't know how
to ship a tablet OS -- they're a B2B group trying to do B2C, but not really
understanding what it takes. The result is emabarassingly bad in spots. My
wife was having to deal with The Scourge That Is the Windows Registry, using
the event viewer and task manager to diagnose some bug in WinRT. They really
do not get it . . . or if they do, it's not at the level of design and
management where it matters.

You don't have to do this kind of mucking around on a Xbox. There are good
reasons for this. Yet the Xbox is based on Windows. Interesting.

Windows has been institutionalized inside MS to the extent that you can't ship
a platform that doesn't use it. You need to use a /lot/ of it, and it's a
procrustean bed, at best. Windows is getting really old and creaky; things
that you _might_ be able to justify on a desktop (e.g., a corrupt registry, or
a service horking and needing some TLC) are just death on a tablet, and having
consumers drop into desktop-level tools to fix stuff is just sad.

(Don't get me started on WinRT).

~~~
brudgers
Microsoft have always eaten their own dogfood. That's where Server and Office
and Project came from...and obviously, Visual Studio.

Giving RT devices to employees continues this tradition. It's also evidence
that this is an enterprise strategy, not B2C.

I used Windows 2.0. I was using WordPerfect when the first versions of Word
were being developed. Surface is an MVP.

[edit]

A Note about Xbox. The way Microsoft handled the RRoD issue was pure B2B. They
made it right for people out of warranty. Their choice of three years was the
same as the period over which businesses depreciate assets. A B2C response
would have been, "You should have purchased XboxCare."

[/edit]

~~~
SoftwareMaven
If its an enterprise play, how come its software doesn't tie into the
enterprise? No outlook, no power in Office, no AD integration: these are all
things critical in the enterprise.

MS is certainly going to take the intel-based Surface into the enterprise.
This one seems like a weird chimaera, sitting between the enterprise world and
the consumer world. And that won't capture the average tablet buyer's
imagination.

~~~
brudgers
That's a good question. The answer I think is that Microsoft's ARM strategy is
long term.

Instead of kludging around in the OS, you refactor Outlook, Office, Active
Directory, etc. to better address the new reality of less powerful devices
becoming prevalent. Clearly that's already happening as Microsoft pursues
improvements in the cloud. It is also the same direction the companies the
techpress love to compare them against - Apple and Google - are pursuing.

Microsoft's bet is that they will be better at delivering cloud services to
enterprise (and thereby to consumers). I think the evidence makes this a
pretty safe bet.

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trotsky
I am going to ignore most of this because it's just more of the same (even if
a fair amount is true) - it's fashionable to dog on ms right now.

But declaring that using Windows RT (and by extension the full NT kernel) as a
basis for their tablet line was a fatal flaw ignores a whole raft of
significant potential benefits to across their whole product line.

I was surprised when I found out that they were doing a port for their tablet
instead of basing it on their mobile code base, but once they announced they
were going to be using mainline nt on the phone too it all clicked.

Let's get real: The core NT kernel team is the unheralded jewel of microsoft.
They put together a good base when their legacy16/32 base of 95/98 was clearly
close to technical self destruction. In 10 years Windows stability on the
desktop went from borderline worst to best in class by a notable margin. And
while few people realize it, they have been consistently the first major
player with modern security features and systems like nx, boot chain
validation, driver signing requirements, default auto software upgrades,
heavily improved os/browser sandboxing, document version based backups, 1st
party FDE, and on and on.

Note I'm taking the NT kernel team. Not microsoft as a business, app
developer, marketer, pariah. I have code in the linux kernel, am typing on os
x and goog/aapl make my gadgets.

All I know is if I saw tablets/phones as an existential threat to my business
and my earlier efforts had clear technical problems, I'd want to put my best
team thats proven they can evolve on it. It's a perfect time - phones are
shipping 4 cores and 2 gigs, meanwhile my server 2012 domain controller has
been running great with 2 vcpus and uses on average 700mb.

At the same time laptops and servers are making a huge push into super low
power operation. This requires more than just hardware changes - the mobile
os's work hard on freezing workloads that aren't actively being used and it
makes a big difference. Traditional desktop OS's are super bad at this because
of history and existing applications, but future laptops and datacenters are
destined for similar techniques. Even if WinRT dies horribly, the laptops
people buy in a few years will be benefiting from microsoft's shared learning
there. And of course, maybe that full windows laptop they buy won't be running
on an x86 cpu.

I'm not rushing out to buy a surface or lumia it's true, but they certainly
have piqued my interest and in my opinion they are currently doing the best
technical/product/design work that they've done since... pretty much ever.

~~~
seanmcdirmid
What is sort of weird is that Microsoft is the only company that is doing this
with their own kernel. Everyone else (Google, Apple) have appropriated some
other open source technolog for that (NetBSD for OS/X, Linux for Android) as
if the kernel somehow wasn't a competitive advantage anymore.

I have no idea which approach is "better," this is just an interesting
observation and might hint at the values of the companies involved.

~~~
trotsky
I think building a tier 1 (or even tier 2) from scratch has gotten a well
deserved reputation for being borderline impossible.

Just consider how many great efforts have crashed in the last 20 years:
AmigaOS, GemOS (Atari), OS/2, BeOS, MacOS9, Palm, Symbian, WinCE and others.
The ones that are still hanging on don't paint a much brighter picture.

I'm sure there are a few teams out there that would have a good shot, but the
daunting task+access to good/free that your staff already has experience
with... well.

That said, it's great MS is still at it - heterogenous infrastructure is
probably a lot more resistant at a macro scale.

------
timbre
Has Microsoft _ever_ produced a good version 1? Maybe XBox? I don't know much
about games. But for the most part I think what MS is good at is slowly
improving a turd until it's really quite nice. DOS, Windows, IE, Office, and
Visual Studio were all much worse than their competition initially, but
successful by their fourth versions or so.

But I don't know if MS has the heart anymore to go through a few rounds of
failure to reach success.

~~~
rednukleus
Most big tech products are like that. The first Android and iOS devices were
pretty crap (but showed promise).

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mittermayr
to be honest, what fascinates me is that microsoft seems to have invested a
lot of work the past few years to bring forward a pretty decent line up of
integrated products. if you want windows and office like you had, that's fine.
and much of the windows 8 UI disaster was actually made up by the press to
have a great story, even that one video with the guy's dad. i was shocked when
i saw that. then i installed windows and while setting up my account, it
actually taught me about the new things pretty well. there's room for
improvement for sure, but compared to apple, they do not only need to come up
with a reasonable set of visible features (yes, this is how the masses work,
not us here), but also make these mostly visual features feasible for business
and consumers. people tend to forget that talking about 'business' does not
mean a brooklyn hipster photography shop, or a startup (although there are
just as many employees there) - it means a small shop in india, a global giant
like boeing or a government system in germany (munich switched back).

and, in all that chaos, they need to present a clear thread from the mobile
sales guy to enterprise software, from consumer home to consumer mobile.

apple is basically focusing on getting the story at home right. now they have
the luxury of adding to that, which they become less and less effective at.
the iphone was fantastic, and my home is now equipped fully with apple. but it
sucks that this is where the story ends, at least for now (i'm sure they've
figured this out already).

i'd love to see microsoft getting a bit more love, honestly. all these guys
working hard, being the 'bad guy' since the 80's and everyone forgetting that
there's a reason they're still in business, were never close to being shut
down and very rarely every fire more than a few people. when they do, it's
even in the news (last firing spree iirc was 2000 employees, 3 years ago or
so, with +100k staff).

very sad that the 'press' still finds it lovely to tell us all how much
microsoft really sucks. i love visual studio, i love c#, i love my iphone but
man the windows phone 8 is so smooth and great to use, i love the macbook it
beats any other notebook, but I also love windows 8 and the freshness of it.

what a drama world.

~~~
btipling
I imagine, since you say you love C# are you a .Net programmer? Others have
pointed out that .Net programmers are Microsoft's biggest cheerleaders these
days and have a conflict of interest in speaking about Microsoft's future
since maybe they have staked their career on .NET.

~~~
zanny
Personally, if I wanted an interpreted language with bytecode, I much prefer
C#. Much nicer language than Java. But the windows tools suck in my book (VS
is slow as hell, their compilers are arcane, etc) and I much prefer Mono. The
nice thing about Mono is that you can target every platform ever with it,
including mobile.

So if I were contracted to write something business class in something
interpreted, I'd definitely put C# with Mono at the top of the list. It is
much nicer than Java to develop in, and has platform parity.

------
kayoone
I still think MS are up to something with Win 8. Look at the new Thinkpad
Helix for example. Its a full fledged i5/i7 11.6" Laptop running Win8, and if
you remove the Display you have a i7 powered tablet running Win8. Basically
all your computing needs in one device. Sure they need to sort out a few
things here and there, but this is the 1st generation of devices which looks
really good. WinRT is DOA though, it needs alot of work and i dont see that
worth it.

------
Amanda_Panda
Yeah, even as a .Net developer who generally has high praise for C# and VS, I
agree that the WinRT Surface was DOA. Its exactly like those Android tablets
that came out in 2011 with Android 3.x-really nice devices, definitely not
garbage, but aren't worth the price they are being sold at. The difference is
that was two years ago and Android tablets are finally moving ahead, after
dropping in price (Fire, Nook, N7) and improving massively in terms of the OS
on parity with iOS (JB and up). MSFT can't afford to enter the market like
this two years late.

I'd say that the tablet should'e been priced at 299, with the keyboard cover
thrown in. Maybe that'd have increased its popularity. On the plus side it
also has file system access, command line, and powershell (for the 1% of the
market who are geeky Windows sysadmin types). It also should've been sold at a
lot of different stores right out of the gate.

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relaxatorium
What's up with the repeated use of the term "fondleslab" here? Is that actual
UK slang, or is the author just a weirdo?

I could not concentrate on any points made in this article because the
repeated use of that term was wildly offputting.

~~~
mixmastamyk
Use of a funny word is wildly offputting?

Reminds me of an ancient bit on HBO's "Not Necessarily the News"... guy in the
dark complaining bitterly at the TV, they rush him out the door into the front
yard, limping in bathrobe, his eyes squinting in the sunlight, narrator loudly
proclaims "GO OUTSIDE!". ;)

~~~
relaxatorium
"wildly" might be overstating it, but I find it gross. Same way some people
just don't like the word "moist", I guess. I was curious where the word came
from.

Anyhow, back to our regular discussions of what Fondleslabs are going to
conquer the market in 2013.

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mikecane
What problem does Windows RT solve? Aside from niche use cases for IT types,
nothing I can see. Potential customers seem to agree -- they're not buying it.

~~~
zanny
It solves the problem of Microsoft not having a tablet. There was a big pie in
ipads, they wanted some pie, make a tablet. While they were at it, they could
make it one of the most closed platforms ever conceived to try to make that
app store money. Because that is where the new revenue is at, after all. That
was Microsoft's arguments, at least, I'd imagine.

~~~
mikecane
>>>It solves the problem of Microsoft not having a tablet.

For _customers_.

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rbanffy
I'm old enough to remember Apple II's (and personal computers in general) were
the BYOD of the late 70's and early 80's.

~~~
SoftwareMaven
That's an interesting point, as it shows that today's BYOD could crystallize
into another homogenous world. I kind of thing it won't, though, just because,
in the late 70s and early 80s, personal computers were rare and relatively
expensive things. In today's BYOD, we are talking much greater proliferation
at much lower cost.

~~~
rbanffy
I'm not thinking less about consolidation and more about disruption. BYOD is
the personal computer to Microsoft's mainframe.

------
dschiptsov
Excellent slogan: _Microsoft: The software stinks_

or it is better suited for Java?

