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.
Microsoft's ARM blunder: Why Windows RT was DOA
51–60 of 63 posts
Re: Microsoft's ARM blunder: Why Windows RT was DOA
#52If 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 table…
>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. If that is the argument then MS will fail. This isn't 20 years ago where corporate could dictate what tech you used. As it is, half of these arguments in this article are flawed. The Surface isn't as good as what was offered by OEMs or Apple. . How does the Surface we…
How does the Surface weigh more than an iPad 3 when the iPad 3 had a high-res display and was already considered to heavy? Why does the Surface have a kickstand that is useless on your lap when typing? This is what hardware design is about.
The delta in weight between the iPad3 and Surface is pretty close to zero (15 grams). Furthermore, while the iPad3 has the HiRes display the Surface does have a USB and MicroSD slot and a better feeling body material.
And the kickstand is usable on my lap. Not as nice as a laptop, but I use it on my lap nearly everyday.
I'm sure MS will get better at hardware and software but they should learn patience first instead of being so quick in attempting to jump both Apple and Google in product development.
Actually they did the exact right thing, IMO. You don't get great at HW design by not shipping. The Surface is a very good product. Not great, but it will get better I'm sure. Much like the iPod and iPad.
Re: Microsoft's ARM blunder: Why Windows RT was DOA
#53If 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 table…
The problem is that there's a whole US generation not being brought up in a PC household. You don't think kids of today are gonna make purchasing decisions of tomorrow? That companies are going to be able to sustain a PC-only environment in the face of the fact that the majority of college students are using Mac? That businesses across the board are adopting "BYOD"?
This is what should terrify MSFT - this is absolutely devastating. This is why they have XBox. This is why they attempted the Zune. This is why they have a tablet.
Yes, the business environment is MS' bread-and-butter, but it's going to suffer catastrophic hits over the next 5-10 years as the "Anything-but-Windows" generation grows up. You seriously think that companies will be able to maintain their MS hegemony when the majority of new employees have grown up with a Mac, iOS, and/or Android?
Make no mistake - this is huge, and what will break Microsoft's back. A diversified IT client base breaks Microsoft's stranglehold. You pay a fortune (a definite price premium) for Exchange, Office, SQL Server, Sharepoint, Windows Server, etc. because it gives you labor/cost savings in an all-PC environment.
Once you throw iOS, Mac, Android, etc. devices into the mix, you no longer have that advantages. If I was a CIO or CTO and my business users were complaining that IT is too restrictive, that it's impacting hiring and employee retention - there's no way that a "MS-only" policy is going to stand. If you're a startup or other small/medium sized business - why wouldn't you switch to Google Apps for Mail? Oh, and it includes a lot of other things, too (groups, "office-lite" collaboration; oh and a Chromebook that "just works" within this environment).
Not that MS won't still be a big player in businesses but a lot of the "demand" for MS business apps are propped up by economies of a homogenous environment. Once that starts to unravel, there's no stopping it.
ref http://macdailynews.com/2012/06/06/gartner-apple-macs-invadi... http://plzkthxbai.com/blog/2009/09/24/nearly-58-of-college-s... http://daringfireball.net/linked/2010/08/08/mac-share-colleg... http://tech.fortune.cnn.com/2010/08/07/big-macs-on-campus/
Re: Microsoft's ARM blunder: Why Windows RT was DOA
#54Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Windows didn't come to dominate the desktop because consumers loved it. PC users did not hate it. Most DOS users were not ready to move to Macs and Windows provided an easy migration path, with 3.1 being, finally, good enough and able to run multiple DOS applications simultaneously.
And at the time (this is pre OS X) apples OS was not preemptive multitasking which is sort of required for a useful window based GUI
> sort of required for a useful window based GUI
Not really. At that time, I was programming under Windows 3 and I quickly learned to call yield() from within long-running functions. It was not perfect, but it was good enough.
Re: Microsoft's ARM blunder: Why Windows RT was DOA
#55Earlier quoted context omitted.
Businesses work on desktops and active directories. WinRT makes no sense on the desktop, and it offers no AD. So MS has nothing to offer here, B2B wise. They made a huge mistake, pretending that desktops and mobile devices are the same beast. And they're gonna pay for it, in sales and market value. At the end of 2013, they should be a even less relevant than today.
> At the end of 2013, they should be a even less relevant than today. At the moment, Microsoft own slightly less than 100% of the enterprise desktop market. At the end of 2013 they will almost certainly own slightly less than 100% of the enterprise desktop market. You live in a bubble.
Let's see.
To the businesses, MS has nothing substantially new or exciting to offer.
True, desktop usage will probably remain about the same (with a slight decline), but meanwhile, the mobile computing world is growing rapidly, with MS being largely out of the picture.
Desktop OSes will continue to sale, but they become day-by-day a very small fragment of the OSes out there. Win7 is a great OS, but I'm sure various alternatives, coming from the mobile world and leveraging their success there, will try to replace it.
I love Windows (7), use Visual Studio and other Microsoft tools daily, but this has nothing to do with the real changes that occur in the tech world.
MS bet wrong, and as occurs in the free market, they'll lose.
Re: Microsoft's ARM blunder: Why Windows RT was DOA
#56Earlier quoted context omitted.
> At the end of 2013, they should be a even less relevant than today. At the moment, Microsoft own slightly less than 100% of the enterprise desktop market. At the end of 2013 they will almost certainly own slightly less than 100% of the enterprise desktop market. You live in a bubble.
Let's see. To the businesses, MS has nothing substantially new or exciting to offer. True, desktop usage will probably remain about the same (with a slight decline), but meanwhile, the mobile computing world is growing rapidly, with MS being largely out of the picture. Desktop OSes will continue to sale, but they become day-by-day a very small fragment of the OSes out there. Win7 is a great OS, but I'm sure various a…
None of what you just said, regardless of whether it is true or not, changes the fact that Microsoft are incredibly relevant, and will continue to be for the immediate future.
Re: Microsoft's ARM blunder: Why Windows RT was DOA
#57I 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.
Re: Microsoft's ARM blunder: Why Windows RT was DOA
#58I'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.
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.
I'm not thinking less about consolidation and more about disruption. BYOD is the personal computer to Microsoft's mainframe.
Re: Microsoft's ARM blunder: Why Windows RT was DOA
#59Earlier quoted context omitted.
Anecdote 1: I see iPads on trains to London as often as I see Thinkpads (and the odd Dell) now. That was not the case a few years ago. Trains to London arriving before 9am are pure business I can assure you (£130 return second class). A few Mac laptops in first class, solid Thinkpad/iPad and blue shirt territory in 2nd. Anecdote 2: The middle managers where I work all have iPads and shared access to desktop PCs. They…
What industry do you work in? I have not yet seen (in London) a single work-issued iPad. I've seen one or two people who have brought their own in to work, but they don't do anything more with it that check email and read a few word documents. I've also never seen anyone on a train use an iPad for anything that looked like work. There are loads of them, but everyone is playing games, reading news etc. My anecdotal ex…
Just anecdotal: what I see each morning as I walk past the London train. You are probably right, perhaps there is a bias on the sample.
I work in education. Middle managers entering data on an iPad is easier in a classroom with 30+ people milling around - no need to sit. They do email and access RDP on them as well. There was tablet use before from years ago for similar reasons.
I don't know what the people on the train are doing, but it looks like corporate applications. Not shopping or video. Some reading and annotating of PDFs. I don't want to start shoulder surfing!
The advice/late train people at the station now use iPads to display timetable info as well by the way. They move to where the slightly confused knot of passengers left by the train that broke down are, instead of getting them to queue up. Seems a sensible use of a tablet given the cost of a person.
Re: Microsoft's ARM blunder: Why Windows RT was DOA
#60I 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…
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.