
The Mobile Train Has Left The Windows 8 Platform Behind - MaysonL
http://techpinions.com/the-mobile-train-has-left-the-windows-8-platform-behind/14012?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=the-mobile-train-has-left-the-windows-8-platform-behind
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zmmmmm
I must admit I'm surprised RT did not do better out of the gate. I had always
assumed there was some segment of the business market for whom "real" office
on a real tablet is a "shutup and take my money" proposition. I would have
expected some large fortune 500's to just deploy them en-masse as an ultra-
manageable office "appliance" for employees who don't need anything else. I
would have thought Microsoft would have sewn up such deals in advance, even if
they had to virtually give them away for publicity sake. The fact it hasn't
happened should be quite worrying, I think.

> Only Samsung and Apple are competing in phones

I get a bit sick of this kind of line. Yes, sure, Samsung is on top now in the
Android world. Only a short time ago HTC was on top. Now it's changed to
Samsung. That's the very definition of competition. Now Google is shipping
Nexus 4's via LG and LG can't make enough of them. To say there is no
competition is utterly ridiculous.

The really shocking thing is that in the last quarter Microsoft's smart phone
market share actually dropped. Even with the assistance of all the pent up
demand of people waiting for Windows 8, it still went down. Even if there was
no intrinsic market demand for these products I would have expected an initial
surge from the faithful just to try out something new.

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clauretano
The unfortunate thing is that Windows RT is completely un-manageable, in the
only way any Windows Sysadmin cares: group policy.

For most sysadmins, the fact that Windows RT cannot join a domain and cannot
be managed with GPOs/SCCM makes it a nonstarter.

It's fairly easy to manage iOS devices with any number of MDM tools.

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zmmmmm
Wow, I didn't know that. It's terrible that iOS devices are more manageable in
an enterprise than an RT device. I would have thought it would be bullet point
#1 on the feature list. It's kind of telling really. RT seems very confused -
shipping with Office seems to target it at business users. But being unsuable
in a corporate environment makes it only viable as a consumer device. But then
it's very expensive as a consumer device. Perhaps in the end it's just not
right for anybody and that is the answer to why it's not sold well.

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damian2000
I think Surface Pro (i.e Windows 8) was meant to be their 'business' tablet OS
though ... Win RT is sort of a halfway house for home users that want some
form of windows compatibility.

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mitchty
As an apple user I just don't understand why Microsoft would make RT less
administrable via group policy. Just seems an odd decision.

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Steko
"And even as Android’s market share has increased, iOS’s profit share has
increased too."

This is not correct, iOS's profit share peaked in 2011. At any rate I agree
iOS is doing fine.

I disagree with the bigger conclusion about Microsoft. Windows 8/RT/WP 8
literally just launched. Should we have judged the iPhone a failure based on
Nokia's dominant profit position less then 6 months after the iPhone launched?
That would be silly.

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habitue
The thing is, the iPhone offered something Nokia was not offering, there was
room to grow. Microsoft isn't offering anything new or compelling, they are
playing catch up. They've muscled their way into markets late in the game
before, but they seem to be getting less adept at it over time.

~~~
jmcdonald-ut
To say Microsoft isn't offering anything new or compelling is a matter of
opinion. They are going to be the first company to offer the most consistent
experience across phone, tablet, and computer.

I'm not concluding whether or not they will be successful, just saying that
Microsoft may indeed be offering something compelling and new to consumers
with tech devices (consistency).

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jmillikin

      > They are going to be the first company to offer the most
      > consistent experience across phone, tablet, and computer.
    

I'd argue that Apple got there first, with the addition of virtual desktops
and Launchpad to OS X.

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jgh
Sure LaunchPad kinda looks like iOS, but it's not really the same thing.

~~~
seanmcdirmid
Definitely.

As it stands now, I have two completely separate experiences on my Windows 8
laptop (desktop and metro), whereas I just have one on my Macbook Air that is
approaching an iOS experience ever so slightly on each new OS X version. I'm
not sure what position is being argued though. It seems like Apple is
converging faster than Microsoft.

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jmspring
Can't argue with the numbers and making no defenses for anything. I've got a
Surface RT, I like the hardware, wish the OS didn't show it's windows roots as
much.

That's not my point though. While Apple and Samsung are riding high, the
mobile world can change quickly. It wasn't that long ago that Nokia was king.

There will be more innovation to come.

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zyang
I'm not a fan of microsoft, but this is pretty short sighted. The convergence
game is just warming up, and microsoft is in position.

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damian2000
So how long do you need - 12 more years? Because that's how long MS has so far
been trying and failing to get a decent market share of the smartphone market.
They started with Windows Mobile back in April, 2000 and have always been
playing catchup.

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ghostnappa
Something about the entire basis of this article urks me. Maybe it is from me
starting into mobile development, but in the end or near future, it is to
mobile's benefit that applications are platform agnostic and live on the web.
There will be circumstances where native development is beneficial, but there
will come the time where the facebook app or the cnn app should no longer be
relevant. So I'm not sure why in the long term this even matters, the only
necessity is that the production is scaled to where they don't lose money. At
the same time, I'm probably making this argument more for Ubuntu for phones
than anything else.

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bithive123
How long have you been doing web development? These things are cyclical. Back
when Flash was FutureSplash, HTML seemed decrepit until eventually it became
clear that HTML5 and JavaScript would take over the space. Then just as HTML5
was finished hiding Flash's body, native mobile apps (replete with "web
views") started pushing the pendulum in the other direction. Whether we'll see
the "mobilization" of the desktop OS or the "webification" of the apps still
remains to be seen. Either way, "the cloud" is here to stay.

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danboarder
There is more than one mobile train. The mobile market has tracks going all
over and is still very dynamic. There is a lot of room for disruption and
change.

Beyond Android and iOS - Windows 8 mobile, Firefox OS mobile, Ubuntu for
phones, Tizen, Sailfish, perhaps even a renewed effort by open WebOS - all of
these mobile platform efforts have a chance to reshape the market over the
coming years.

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ChikkaChiChi
How many startups out there are kicking off some new product and basing their
launch exclusively on Microsoft technologies? Even in recent memory, the only
one I can think of would be StackExchange.

I _really_ like C#. But other than limited Mono support, you're forced into
using or relying on your users to conform to Microsoft standards.

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malkia
If only Microsoft really loved C#...

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seanmcdirmid
Microsoft really loves C#. What love have you seen C# not getting lately?

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natem345
The Metro APIs are all based on the old Win32 APIs & COM. Sure .NET is
supported, but it's certainly not the dominant language nor was it a nice
clean break as they could've done. Plus they've killed XNA and told people to
switch their games from C# to C++ (especially on WP8).

~~~
seanmcdirmid
WinRT is actually kind of neat: they've taken what were before .NET-only APIs
(like WPF), wrapped them in some sort of reference counting technology, and
made these APIs callable from C++ code in a fairly easy ways. Reference
counting does seem like its displacing garbage collection a bit, but that was
true for iOS also. C# interoperates transparently.

I'm a MS researcher but I don't speak for Microsoft. That being said, I'm a
big fan of SharpDX and MonoGame for my personal projects. They work well
enough that I have avoided going native. Ya, I'm still a bit miffed that this
isn't supported out of the box, but in practice its easy to work around.

