Microsoft's ARM blunder: Why Windows RT was DOA • Hacker News Board

Re: Microsoft's ARM blunder: Why Windows RT was DOA

#61

Post by trotsky » Sun, Jan 20, 2013, 1:25 AM UTC

seanmcdirmid wrote: post #60

trotsky wrote: post #57

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…

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 compani…

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.

Re: Microsoft's ARM blunder: Why Windows RT was DOA

#62

Post by mikecane » Mon, Jan 21, 2013, 2:22 PM UTC

zanny wrote: post #27

mikecane wrote: post #25

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.

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.

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

For customers.

Re: Microsoft's ARM blunder: Why Windows RT was DOA

#63

Post by technoslut » Tue, Jan 22, 2013, 3:01 PM UTC

kenjackson wrote: post #52

technoslut wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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 sl…

>You don't get great at HW design by not shipping.

You also don't get sales by shipping a product too early. The Playbook proved this. There are inherent design flaws within RT that has also plagued W8 usability that MS did not give proper consideration of before release.