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| 'What is Windows RT? Redmond, we have a problem' |
| By Thom Holwerda, submitted by MOS6510 on 2012-10-21 16:13:31 |
| "I've been writing about Windows for almost 20 years, and I feel like I've kind of seen it all. But for the past several days, I've been struggling under the weight of the most brutal email onslaught I've ever endured over these two decades. And if my email is any indication, and I believe it is, the majority of people out there have absolutely no idea what Windows RT is. This is a problem." When even Paul Thurrot is worried, you can be sure it is, actually, a problem. We're going to see and hear about a lot of frustrated customer who can't load up their 1997 copy of Awesome Garden Designer 2.0 Deluxe. |
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| Windoes RT != Windows |
| By wigry on 2012-10-21 18:37:02 |
| This is the first time in history where Windows name does not imply the expected behavior. So far consumers could ignore the suffix appended to Windows name. Would it be 95, 2000, XP, Vista or 7 - they were all Windows in the sense users expected. RT however is not Windows anymore from the consumers perspective and this will indeed be a huge mess. |
 - Score: 6 |
| RE[3]: Welcome to the reality people |
| By sultanqasim on 2012-10-21 18:41:13 |
|
In that sense, iPads and similar tablets should be called nanocomputers, and smartphones should be called picocomputers. They are different sized devices with different purposes. The largest of supercomputers and the smallest of android smartphones run Linux. Does that make them all PCs? Anyways, what difference does the term PC make? The point is that small light tablets and smartphones are taking the former roles of conventional desktops and laptops for things like casual web browsing and gaming, while conventional personal computers are now used more often for specific tasks requiring typing, more precision, and more screen real estate. |
| - Score: 1 |
| RE: A fool and... |
| By WorknMan on 2012-10-21 19:00:13 |
|
> Windows RT is a fools errand at the moment and anyone buying it either is or will think themselves a fool after. "Metro" and the few apps available are half-baked and not fit for purpose. Yes, perhaps maybe, in a couple of years it'll all come together and make sense. For now, at the price, you'd be a fool not to buy an iPad, can't stand the OS myself, or some sort of Android tablet. It's funny that you mentioned the iPad, since when it was announced, geeks around the world turned their noses up at it saying, "Oh, this isn't OSX! It's just a toy... big iPod Touch... it'll never sell." And then it sold like 9 billion units. Hell, people went and lined up around the block to buy the first iPhone, and that thing couldn't even run apps. My point? Since geeks are writing Windows RT off and labeling it a failure before it's even released, that means it'll probably sell well :) Well, there's a decent chance it'll flop, but I'm not counting it out until I find out what Joe Averages think about it. Would be funny though if there were a massive amount of returns on the pre-orders, because people actually thought they were buying a tablet with Windows 8 on it. |
| - Score: 2 |
| RE[2]: A fool and... |
| By stooovie on 2012-10-21 19:52:29 |
|
There's one significant difference: RT tablets are marketed as Windows. Joe Sixpack cannot grasp the concept of runtimes, different CPU families or bit compatibility, and he really shouldn't. iOS devices were never marketed as OSX or Mac devices. |
| - Score: 5 |
| RE: Windoes RT != Windows |
| By steampoweredlawn on 2012-10-21 19:54:01 |
|
> This is the first time in history where Windows name does not imply the expected behavior. So far consumers could ignore the suffix appended to Windows name. Would it be 95, 2000, XP, Vista or 7 - they were all Windows in the sense users expected. RT however is not Windows anymore from the consumers perspective and this will indeed be a huge mess. That's not entirely true. I know a lot of people that bought Windows 2000 as the logical upgrade to Windows 98 and found that half their apps would not run. They didn't realize that Me was the proper upgrade path for 9x users. |
| - Score: 4 |
| RE[2]: A fool and... |
| By Yehppael on 2012-10-21 20:07:04 |
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Actually betting on a MS failure in mobile computing, is almost always a safe bet. What they really need to do, is completely divorce the mobile from Windows, rebrand it and launch it as something completely new. Geeks have their reasons for disliking it, but the average people will think "wait, windows? that's what I have on my PC, I get viruses all the time, needs a lot of work to maintain" etc etc etc. |
| - Score: 5 |
| RE[2]: Welcome to the reality people |
| By demosthenese on 2012-10-21 20:17:49 |
|
"No, PCs are desktop or laptop computers that run Windows on Intel-compatible hardware, and are descendent from the original IBM PC. Other systems have a similar aspect, but they are not PCs." and 'hacking' is doing bad things on computers and 'trolling' is being mean on computers... Just because most people believe a thing to be true does not make it so. Some of us are old enough to remember the review of the IBM pc in PC World magazine (UK) - years after the magazine's first issue. |
| - Score: 8 |
| RE[2]: Windoes RT != Windows |
| By tanzam75 on 2012-10-21 21:48:36 |
|
> That's not entirely true. I know a lot of people that bought Windows 2000 as the logical upgrade to Windows 98 and found that half their apps would not run. They didn't realize that Me was the proper upgrade path for 9x users. Well, that wasn't their fault, was it? It's Microsoft's fault, for naming it Windows 2000 instead of Windows NT 5.0. In the present situation, it's not difficult to call it the "Surface OS." Didn't people use to make fun of Microsoft's long product names? Here's one place where it could actually help. The x86 version would be "Windows 8, with support for Surface applications." -- Windows 2000 was originally supposed to be the OS that unified the legacy and NT lines. In other words, it was supposed to be XP. The unification took longer than planned, so Microsoft released it, but kept the name. By doing this, they ended up without a name for the successor to Windows 98, and had to call it Millennium. And then because of the spiffy name for ME, they had to name the unification OS XP. Then Vista, and we finally end up right back where we were before Windows 95, with Windows 7. Just when some sanity seems to have returned, Windows RT. Just wait until Windows 9 -- will it be RT 2.0 or RT 9.0? Edited 2012-10-21 21:51 UTC |
| - Score: 4 |
| A couple of weird claims in Thurrott's article |
| By rklrkl on 2012-10-21 22:02:31 |
|
I'm going to cast some doubt on a couple of statements in Thurrott's article: "Windows RT will not run any desktop applications beyond the applications that are bundled with the operating system." I don't know if this is true (obviously non-bundled Metro apps are possible), but if bundled apps can access desktop mode and non-bundled apps can't, then this is a very peculiar lock-out decision from Microsoft. It effectively prevents any non-MS Intel Windows desktop software from being recompiled to work in RT's desktop mode. It does explain why Chrome and Firefox are rushing to produce a Metro version of their browsers I guess! You could understand it if the Surface RT was the *only* hardware with Windows 8 that MS were going to make, but they're following it up with the Pro version that's Intel-based and won't be anywhere near as locked down as the RT. I suspect the lack of third-party apps and the launch of the Pro version of the Surface is going to kill Surface RT stone dead. And it looks like MS even got the price points horribly wrong with Surface (strange, considering that Windows 8 itself is actually sensibly priced). "Windows RT is not a computer operating system." Funny, I could have sworn it was. It might be a horribly locked down OS with hardly any apps (Playbook anyuone...ouch!), but it's surely a computer OS? |
| - Score: 2 |
| RE[3]: A fool and... |
| By WorknMan on 2012-10-21 22:24:05 |
|
> Actually betting on a MS failure in mobile computing, is almost always a safe bet. I dunno... they've screwed it up so many times before, they might actually get lucky this time :) lol |
| - Score: 3 |
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