Samsung nixes plans for Windows RT tablets in US, citing 'modest' demand - Page 3

Quote:

Originally Posted by blackbook 

I just hope that Apple makes iOS more like OS X. It's nice seeing features move from iOS to OS X but when will we see more foundational practical features move from OS X to iOS?

What feature in particular do you want? It thought iOS was a pretty complete operating system.

Originally Posted by Mark Dodel 
Aren't they running out of room at the Redmond city dump for all these MSFT failures yet?

Plenty of desert left. ET on Atari didn't take it all up.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Paul Connell 

I both agree and disagree.  I don't think the traditional Windows UI necessarily dooms a tablet to failure, much to the contrary, I think if you're vastly exceeding the cost of a full-on notebook, the full capabilities of Windows (the full desktop and the ability to run all you're x86 applications) is very important.  I know iPads sell like hotcakes, but I, and a lot of others, simply aren't willing to spend upwards of $800 for a glorified smartphone.  Which is why, despite some of their decisions, I think Microsoft is on the right track with Windows 8 - provide a tablet friendly UI for basic and on-the-go tasks, and the full desktop for when you need to be productive with the "real" applications you need to use.  I know there's some overlap between "apps" and traditional "applications", but there's no denying that when real work needs to be done, there's no replacement for full desktop applications.

Clearly what's dooming Windows RT is that it's essentially nearly all the cost of a full Windows Pro system with none of the benefits - unlike iOS or Android tablets, the available app selection is extremely limited and limiting.  So you don't have access to your traditional applications, you don't have access to much in the way of apps, and the whole Metro UI is essentially barely out of beta status. 

On the other hand, give it a generation or two, and I think Windows RT will be gone and Windows Pro will make a very compelling OS for truly dual-purpose tablets - a touch friendly UI when it's used as a tablet, drop it into a dock and you have a full desktop OS for when you need those capabilities. 

I think you have it almost exactly backwards here.  

If you think an iOS tablet is a "glorified smartphone" then you aren't really in the market for a tablet at all.  You are the part of the market that doesn't actually see much value in the new mobile computing paradigm, and would really prefer a laptop, which is essentially what Microsoft Surface Pro is, a hybrid laptop.  

Neither Windows Surface RT, nor Windows Surface Pro, are really tablets at all, they are convertible/hybrid laptops.  In the case of RT however, it runs on a different processor, and while it *looks* like Windows, it doesn't actually run any Windows apps on it's Windows desktop.  What should have happened, is the Surface RT should have launched *without* the fake, confusing, copy of a Windows desktop in the background.  This would actually make it closer to being a true tablet.  If it also ran in portrait mode, it would actually *be* a tablet.  

This would have had poorer sales, but at least people wouldn't be confused, feel ripped off, and be taking them back to the store for a refund by the truckload.  It would also have made the Surface Pro look a lot better because the Surface Pro would actually be a great little laptop, but with the added benefit of having the tablet OS laying on top if you want to use that too.  

All Microsoft has done with Windows 8 is thoroughly confuse their entire market.  People (average people who buy Microsoft computers), don't even really understand what "Windows 8" is.  Is it the Metro deal?  Is it both together?  Is the underlying "regular" Windows, "Windows 8"?  Who knows?  And next year, when they start selling "Windows RT" tablets without the desktop mode, will that still be "Windows 8"?  If they change the name to something else for clarification, isn't that actually going to be more confusing?  

It's all a big pile of poo and there seems little that can be done to fix it.  It's likely that they even know this at MS headquarters and know how confusing Windows RT is, but they still did it anyway because the only alternative is having Windows RT "stand alone," and they probably know that it can't actually do that.  

Microsoft is absolutely f*cked.  In a few years they will be retreating into the business market and giving up on phones and tablets altogether, as they should be already.  

They got nothing.  They fired their best shot and it landed with a thud.  

What are they going to do, make a whole new third mobile OS and see if that flies?  And will they tie the Windows boat anchor to that effort as well?  

Quote:

Originally Posted by Sensi 

I am glad to go over appleinsider to read about samsung and microsoft... What is your point?

It's apparently about inflating Apple fan's egos. At their very core most Apple fans have grave fears about the future of the company. This may partly be because of the constant drumbeat of negative articles about Apple's ultimate failure being inevitable. We are bombarded by speculation about Apple without Jobs. "Steve would never have done this" laments are common even among the so-called faithful. There's a lot of hate out there for Apple simply because it has been so successful. So any story about possible failure on the part of a rival soothes the deep seated fears and reinforces the positive.

You can't go to any Apple centric site these days without articles about Samsung, Google, Microsoft potentially killing off Apple.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Dick Applebaum 

...

Jon was COO of MS from 1983-1990.. 7 years,,,,. The formative years where MS gained market domination.

Like Mike Markkula at Apple,, Jon Shirley brought the skill and perspective of a "businessman" to MS.

Gates was "wet behind the ears"... or "wet under the arms"... while Shirley brought legitimacy trust/respect and stability To MS.

The Shirley years were the apex... It has been downhill ever since.

Gates and Ballmer are posers.

I don't often agree with you but this is so true.  Thanks for the reminder.  

One of the enduring mysteries (to me) of the tech world, is why Bill Gates especially, gets so many kudos as some kind of visionary or great leader, or even as a good businessman.  The facts have always shouted the exact reverse of this.  His "predictions" of the future of tech have always been the worst in the industry.  I think only Eric Schmidt gets more future trends wrong than Gates.  Everything they have was copied or ripped off from someone else.  The man hasn't even coded since Basic.  Neither he nor Balmer have any "vision" or taste or understanding of what real consumers want at all.  What's more, every action they take and every statement they make shows that they don't even care.  

They just want to sell product.  Period.  

Gates is possibly the biggest poseur of the whole tech industry IMO, and you just know that when he kicks off there will be a big bronze statue of him somewhere and the kids of the future will be told (incorrectly) about what a tech giant he was.  

In reality, Bill Gates is just another shyster businessman who happened to operate in the field of technology, instead of oil, gas, or whatever.  Balmer is just a guy who was lucky enough to be friends with him at the time.  Neither of them are anything that any techie should admire or hold up as some kind of example.  They are both also horrible human beings besides (read up on Gates early family life sometime, quite the shocker).  

Why should Samsung bother when they can leave it a few months, some hacker will put Windows RT on a Galaxy Tab and Samsung can just copy that.

Steve Ballmer is good news for Apple. The guy is clown's shoes, makes bad decisions and is probably the number 1 reason why the PC market is going down as people are pushed over the silky smooth infrastructure of Apple.

Quote:

Originally Posted by jragosta 


This did this once - with Windows XP (I don't count Windows 95 because too much of it was simply built on top of earlier versions). With XP (and the NT it was based upon), they essentially started from scratch and built a new system from the ground up.

Unfortunately, I'm not sure [Microsoft has] the time to do that again, at least as far as RT is concerned. Throwing out the whole mess and starting with a clean sheet of paper as Apple did with OS X would take years (just as it took Apple years to get to the point where the platform was stable and efficient enough to spin off iOS).

Actually, Windows NT started life as "Portable OS/2". OS/2, the operating system that IBM and Microsoft worked on together was also the source of their falling out. IBM wanted it to be married closely to their hardware architecture (e.g. 386, PS/2), while Microsoft wanted it to be portable across many hardware platforms. When they split up on this, each took their code base and went with it in their own direction. Microsoft never succeeded in making it truly portable, because they wanted to remain backward compatible with their older Windows code base. Technically, Windows NT was portable (it ran on Alpha for instance), but other than NeXT, they were never for instance able to make it portable acrosss big-endian versus little-endian CPU architectures. That tells you there was a lot of non-portable bit-wise mucking going on inside (and maybe still is on the Windows API side). It even led to a little status bit on the HPPA CPU architecture that enabled it to switch form its native big-endian to NT's required little-endian architecture. ARM is bi-endian, so they won't run in to trouble there. Maybe the classic old Windows stuff is just too terrible to contemplate porting and testing.

When Apple bought NeXT, they not only got all the goodies like the object oriented frameworks etc. But these frameworks and the underlying Mach kernel were also already fully portable. NeXTSTEP ran on x86, m68k, hppa and SPARC (and in the lab on m88k and ppc according to rumors). This enabled for instance the relatively fast port to PPC and later the relatively easy switch from PPC to x86 and also running it (as iOS) on ARM.

I expect that Apple has OS X running on more than just x86 platforms in the lab and that they keep it up to date on those platforms. Not just to be able to move, but it is a very effective practice to help make sure your programmers don't create nonportable hacks.

Samsung nixes plans for Windows RT tablets in US, citing 'modest' demand

Wow!  Really?  I'm...I'm shocked.  Shocked I tell you.  I thought consumers would go wild for a Windows device that can't run Windows software.

Who could have possibly seen this coming?

Running a dual boot mode would have been even more confusing if that's possible.

 

Quote:

Originally Posted by gwmac 

The only hope this tablet had to succeed is if it could run in dual boot mode to allow a real Windows experience and not a crippled one. That might at least offer some benefit to former netbook customers looking for the portability of a tablet but also needing to use it just like a laptop as well. The 2.0 version will probably address this shortcoming and could fill a niche.

The iPad is a far superior option on many levels and so are pretty much all the android tablets as well. This device will fly first class on a one way trip to the island of misfit toys.
 

Does it matter? No one wanted to pay a license for it because they would be competing directly with Microsoft which owned the technology in the first place.

Quote:

Originally Posted by jragosta 


There were versions of NT for Alpha, Sun, x86 (both 32 and 64 bit, I believe), and PPC. Not all of them made it to market, but the reports at the time indicated that they were ready to go. How much more portable do you want?

Quote:

Originally Posted by bullhead 

cant blame samesung on this one.  Windows RT is a complete abomination. Only an idiot would buy something that bad.

I hear every Microsoft employee is getting an RT tablet.

A Microsoft store was robbed and the thief stole iPads that were there but not a single RT tablet.  LOL

Quote:

Originally Posted by blackbook 


Apple should hire you haha.

But I'm not talking about system settings but app settings which are easy to access in OS X because its always under the same tab no matter what app you're in, even 3rd party apps. In iOS app settings are hidden in the settings app which you have to first switch to, leaving the app you were in, in order to get to anything.

Check in the app for a "gearwheel" icon, which has been the iOS symbol for 'Settings' in an app. Usually, if not a gear, there is another icons in the upper bar which offers access to settings. Unfortunately, too many apps use the the "Settings" app as well.

Cheers

Quote:

Originally Posted by jragosta 


There were versions of NT for Alpha, Sun, x86 (both 32 and 64 bit, I believe), and PPC. Not all of them made it to market, but the reports at the time indicated that they were ready to go. How much more portable do you want?

NT for Alpha was a possibility, because the NT programming team had begun as the Alpha team at DEC. MS sold the "NT on Alpha" idea to DEC, which terminated their OS efforts for Alpha, and the team moved directly to MS and began NT for x86. In turn, MS announced versions of NT for the other major CPU designs, but none ever emerged from the lab. For the most part, it's just people remembering the MS announcement and overlooking the vapourware indicators.

On the other hand, rumours of x86 versions of Mac OS were circulating after the arrival of System 8. During the days of Apple's Slough of Despair, many 'analysts' were quite sure that Mac on the x86 was imminent, or that Apple was about to license NT for PPC, which did not exist outside a press release.

Cheers

Quote:

Originally Posted by AppleSauce007 

I hear every Microsoft employee is getting an RT tablet.

And this will be the mandatory image on the login screen:

Quote:

Originally Posted by gwmac 

The only hope this tablet had to succeed is if it could run in dual boot mode to allow a real Windows experience and not a crippled one. That might at least offer some benefit to former netbook customers looking for the portability of a tablet but also needing to use it just like a laptop as well. The 2.0 version will probably address this shortcoming and could fill a niche.

Hate to tell you this, but if it had a ghost of a chance of running a "real" Windows experience, it would have been released that way.

Quote:

Originally Posted by bullhead 

cant blame samesung on this one.  Windows RT is a complete abomination. Only an idiot would buy something that bad.

Don't underestimate the number of idiots in this country. RT is secret code for Republican Teabaggers...

Quote:

Originally Posted by anantksundaram 

This is the beginning of the end for Microsoft.

I am going to go out on a limb and predict that the stock will enter a death spiral in 2013, with cash flows from Office being the floor for the company's value.

While I did give you a "thumbs up" I do think their stock will drop and Microsoft will be around for a long time albeit no longer as powerful as before. 

Enterprise and government will probably upgrade to Win 7 and sit there. Other competitors are already decimating Microsoft's server business wile Apple has done a great job of filling the hole left by Microsoft's absence in the phone and tablet business. Microsoft has shown that they cannot be relied on to be there with product for enterprise and government. Six years MIA in the phone business and not even yet to market with the "real" Windows tablet, while Apple is on version 6 of a unified phone and tablet OS, and on version 4 of tablet hardware. 

The people in the "C" suites have demanded that IT figure out a way to incorporate MBAs into the company networks along with the iPad and iPhone. It's now a done deal. Once the pooch is screwed there's no reason to go back. Plus, the MS tax is higher than the alternative. 

Finally, iWorks has proven to be "good enough" to bulk of the enterprise and government workers. MS Office still has a place, but it is no longer a "given" like it had been. Enterprise and government have seen that they can operate successfully on less demanding hardware and less costly general office software. The curtain has been pulled aside and the myth has been exposed.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Suddenly Newton 

 

And this will be the mandatory image on the login screen:

 

How about this one: "Who Knows what evil lurks in the hears of men? The Shadow knows!!"

Quote:

Originally Posted by blackbook 


That's pretty much true.

I just hope that Apple makes iOS more like OS X. It's nice seeing features move from iOS to OS X but when will we see more foundational practical features move from OS X to iOS?

The facts tell that's not the case:

a) Apart from the initial kernel, has any OSX concept or functionality been added to iOS after the first iOS release? Nope.

b) Has any iOS concept or functionality been added to OSX in a way that OSX needs to be used like if it was iOS? Plenty: Launchpad, autosave+versions (which effectively changes the file paradigm and needs re-learning, because now every file is always open and it's not possible to close files), nonsense Calendar textures, inverted scrolling by default (which is very comfortable for touch interfaces, but completely absurd and nonintuitive for mouse/trackpad interfaces), hidden scrollbars by default, and I guess I'm forgetting something but I don't remember now.

Funnily, I never used any of such "imported from iOS" concepts, because I don't want to use my computer like if it was a phone. I want to use it like it is: a Mac.

So, from all these facts, we can reasonably guess that it's likely to expect to see more iOS concepts introduced into OSX in the future, but it is unlikely that we'll see the power and flexibility of OSX brought into iOS.

I believe we'll closer to see a fully sandboxed OSX (without direct access to the filesystem), than an hypothetical "Files app" for iOS.

People arguing OSX is greater when it becomes more and more like iOS, please... can you enlighten me how are you supposed to use iOS for efficiently design iOS apps, write their code, debug it, and compile it?

Or maybe Apple users aren't expected to write Objective C?

Quote:

Originally Posted by SolipsismX 

I'm a huge fan of Linnaeus's efforts in designing a modern method to cataloging every living thing on earth in a standard way and yet that jerk Melvil Dewey** is a known name and Linnaeus's isn't.

* Linguistics is a branch of anthropology.
** I have nothing against Dewey or his decimal system. Just being flippant for the sake of it.

Not sure who Dewey is, but I know Linnaeus...