4 ms·
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
by zmmmmm 14y ago
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.
- clauretano 14y agoThe 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.
- zmmmmm 14y agoWow, 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.
- damian2000 14y agoI 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.
- tl 14y ago> It's fairly easy to manage iOS devices with any number of MDM tools. You mean it's fairly easy to manage a (small but slowly growing) list of privileges that Apple provides and impossible otherwise.
- eitally 14y agoThere's this, and then there's also the fact that it's a large investment to replace desktops or laptops en masse with something brand new. Even corporations that have a form hardware refresh policy typically only replace user computers on a rolling 3 or 4 year cycle. Besides day to day management (patching, A/V, GPOs, etc), what the inability to join a domain means for large companies is that they cannot track what they have in use in any useful way, primarily the useful way that Microsoft cares about when it comes to Enterprise Agreement negotiations. This is a huge bugbear, but one that millions of companies have to deal with triannually.
- seanmcdirmid 14y ago> The really shocking thing is that in the last quarter Microsoft's smart phone market share actually dropped. Not shocking, there were still a lot of old WinMob (like HD1s) out there that hand't been replaced yet. > 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. In a universe where even the apple fanboy is a myth, I'm not sure there are any faithful anymore.