They're using Windows RT | Hacker News Reader

They're using Windows RT

zdnet.com

73 points1337biz73 comments

I work at a large consumer electronics retailer as a salesperson in the computer and tablet section.

You would be blown away by how many Surface RT's I've sold, simply by demoing Metro on the touch screen, the Touch Cover, and the fact that you can plug in USB devices and has Office included.

People who's netbooks are dying now, and want to replace it with something for their normal light usage love it. The best bits of both worlds.

The problems arise when someone expects it to be as useful as a $1000 ultra book. That's where the Pro comes in, but I've sold them mostly to business owners who are using it for sales and other on-the-floor purposes

I do the opposite thing when someone asks what to buy. I sort them out an older Lenovo T-series with windows 7 x64, security essentials and open office for around 150GBP. Never a single complaint.

Sure it ain't pretty but they work and are cheap and way more functional than an RT device.

Not sure I could live with the inevitable brick wall when someone takes their RT and tries to install some obscure bit of software they've been relying on for years on it (or open university materials for example). That's instant end game for them, resulting in "why did I buy this piece of shit"

Like when someone tries to do the same with their iPad? As long as you don't sell the RT as being able to run everything, I don't think people will expect it to.

I wouldn't sell them an ipad either, or an android tablet.

RT is a bit of a con as it has the appearance of windows but isn't totally compatible. Most users, despite your best intentions probably have no idea what you are talking about.

It would be a lot easier for people to understand that RT can't run arbitrary Windows applications if Microsoft didn't insist on calling it "Windows."

I agree that the branding could be better, but IMO the Surface Pro is in the weirder spot out of the two. No-one expects Windows Phone to run desktop apps, and I'd wager that people wouldn't expect Windows Tablet (if they called it that much more sensible name) to, either.

Its funny watching peoples eyes light up and mind start racing with possibilities when I explain that the Pro is a full Windows Laptop... that happens to be a tablet as well! :P

My university allows iPads on the network. Any sort of windows ecosystem and you need to install 3rd party software which probably isn't supported by RT.

The problem is perception. Its easy for someone on an iPad to 'get' the fact that it's not a full blown OSX machine where as the line is far more blurry on Microsoft's part.

Of course if Apple has anything to say about it, they want to blur the line just as much (if not moreso).

I feel, honestly, despite personally being a desktop Linux and Mac user myself, for people replacing a netbook they will get more usage out of an RT. While I wouldn't use one for myself, that's only because I don't use Microsoft products anymore. If I was, then my Nexus 7 with bluetooth keyboard would be an RT

Oddly enough, once regular people have a play with the Surfaces, they love the new interface for the most part. I love seeing someone work out how to snap apps side by side: finally I can no longer be sad about windows users wasting their screen real estate with Maximize all the time :P

In reply to your point about running incompatible software: that's what the Qualify step of sales is for. I make it very clear that they won't be able to run anything other than what's in the Store, and show them what is available.

For your average consumer, crazily, and despite what I expected, that's often enough!

In the interests of full disclosure, I am a good sales person, #1 at every store I've worked at in the past 4 years or so, but I truly believe the only reason that is the case is I make a big effort to get the customer the right device :)

I have a Surface Pro and a Surface RT - can run SC2 and VS2012 on the Surface Pro, but despite that I still use my Surface RT far more frequently.

It's an excellent tablet, I love having the keyboard when I need to compose emails or edit spec documents for work when I'm on the go, it has great battery life, the Kindle and Netflix applications are better experiences than their iOS counterparts (on the iPad), and the app selection is actually pretty decent for my use cases.

SC2 runs on the 4000? What settings? That's really good to know!

I have a Surface RT as well and I'm super happy with it. I can do serious Office work with it, work on any file, browser, mail, etc. I bring it with me all the time when I go to my customers to take notes.

Last time I was in a conference, I talked with a Microsoft guy who was happy to see I had a Surface RT. He told me I was the first person he saw at a conference with that device (or a Pro). I was pretty surprised.

So where did Microsoft screw up? Marketing?

Maybe they shouldn't say it's a tablet.

One problem is distribution. They don't have the network of stores that Apple does, and they didn't make Surfaces available in other retailers until quite a while after release. This made it impossible for most people to try before buying.

Another problem is messaging - it's very hard to concisely describe Windows RT's role in a way that people can grasp. It doesn't run legacy software, but it does run Office. Is it a laptop, or a tablet, or what?

Not teaching the sales people how to sell it properly. Their online training is shit.

They should have allowed people to port old-style Win32 apps to ARM. They were IMO betting too much on the shiny new Windows Runtime which is not mature.

If it won't run ported Win32 code there is no compelling reason to get it over an iPad or Android tablet. It's effectively a Windows tablet that doesn't run Windows apps. iPad and Android don't run Windows apps either, but they both have more and better software than the Windows Store and will probably continue to do so for some years to come. OTOH imagine if you could actually use that "Desktop" app to run useful software ported from x86. It might have some of the appeal of the Surface Pro.

(Full disclosure: I worked in the Windows division during Win8 development. I left the company in 2011.)

To be honest, there is no application I currently miss on my Windows RT. Except foobar2000 maybe.

But where you are spot-on is for old games: the ARM has got enough punch to run them and it would turn the RT into an old game portable console.

The other thing that isn't very great is Windows Media Player. It's painful to browse files from a NAS for example.

So a couple of rough edges, but overall, really great.

I'm still baffled at Microsoft's decision to not support desktop apps... They shot themselves in both feet...

I have an RT. And buyer's remorse.

A few apps are beautiful and smooth, but most frequently pause and stutter (for example switching between inboxes in the mail app locks up the UI for seconds) and few third-party apps use the modern UI design language well. The actual app selection is abysmal. I really want to like the tablet and held out hope that Windows 8.1 would fix some of the underlying problems but it turned out to be minor update in functionality.

My wife's iPad was cheaper, is always smooth and has a great selection of apps.

I;m very happy with my Surface RT purchase. I didn't want the weight of the Surface Pro and am fine with knowing that if I have to do any dev work I'll switch to my full size laptop. As a media consumption device it's great, especially if you have an existing library of purchased Xbox movies.

The article concludes that Windows RT meets students needs perfectly, but it's hardly surprising since the college's workflow is so heavily skewed towards Microsoft applications.

It's equivalent to saying Mac OS X is an excellent development environment for iOS apps.

But there are many more students than iOS developers.

True, but someone at the institution probably made the decision to adopt (and/or keep) Microsoft/Citrix around for the department the author's kid is in.

Yeah it's partly a byproduct of some schools being slow to change, which is partly from wanting tight centralized control (like at a business), partly from budget cuts, and partly from just being slow to learn new things and not wanting to have to do more work. Our university still uses Windows XP, just like at some businesses. Our students were still in elementary school when XP was released. And we still use Blackboard since before even XP was released. They don't support Apple or Google stuff at all, even when it's completely free (like Google Apps for Education).

Bah, in the big picture I don't think it is any of those things. "Slow to change" was not the reason I used Powerpoint, Word, and OneNote in college. I used them because they were the best I could find at what they did, and I could afford them because they offered attractive pricing to students. As much as Office might irritate people on occasion, let's be honest here- Office is pretty good, and I'm not aware of any honest competitor.

The only other applications I used specifically for college were remote computing clients, Matlab, and a fairly slick PDF annotator.

Or it's equivalent to saying that design students would rather use Apple products.

It seems to me he is saying "There is a market for Windows RT", for a while there was a lot of people saying "Why wouldn't you downgrade to Android or upgrade to Windows?"

Could you be more specific? I feel like you're mixing cause and effect.

It's not like Microsoft invented spreadsheets and slide decks.

So, universities using proprietary formats (Power Point instead of Libre/Open Office) encourage students to buy Microsoft products. Times have not changed as much as we'd like to think.

Which tablet/device in this price range is best for editing Libre/Open Office documents?

For Windows, the Office software suite is far and away superior to open-source alternatives. If you're using them heavily, the amount of effort/time you'd lose wrangling with Libre is not worth it (I know, I tried.)

It's also what they're going to use when they are done with college and working for most companies.

And those who start companies, will be more likely to mandate Office because it's all they ever knew.

I don't get why people say that.

I am using Libre Office for about 10 years already without issue, except to open proprietary formats...

Have you used ms office? I've used both extensively and ms office is clearly and obviously superior in my opinion. Superior in usability, not in functionality (you can do everything with LO, it just takes more work).

I’ve published an entire dictionary with Libre Office + Python alone. Didn’t find anything missing. Please provide specific examples.

http://medipage.pl/pl/p/Medyczny-slownik-kolokacji.-Polsko-A...

https://s3-eu-west-1.amazonaws.com/deno/S%C5%82ownik+Kolokac...

I'm a huge FOSS proponent but the Ribbon design blows the LibreOffice design out of the water in terms of UX. I'm seriously more productive with MS Office and I've been using OO/LO for 4 years now!

I couldn't disagree more. Yes Office has loads and loads of extra features but I have never seen a university use anything more than the most basic of features. LibreOffice covers this completely and I find it insane that people think that they need Microsoft Office in order to do such basic tasks.

Quite frankly, for those use cases simple solutions like Google Docs are every bit as effective.

But when we get into styles, layouts, designs, working with tables, and any kind of generally complicated document, LibreOffice just starts breaking down.

I'm forced to use LO at work, but I keep Office 11 at home.

My presentations look better than my coworkers, my documents are cleaner and I work more quickly than they do.

I can't begin to explain how much support I offer LibreOffice friends in the office here on "why the numbered list stopped numbering" or "how do I fix this random tabbing issue" or "why is there extra space over here" or "why did my font stop applying?" or "how come the table isn't spacing properly?" any number of a thousand other tiny annoyances that simply manifest far less often in Office.

Fortunately, we've been migrating to Google Docs in the office away from LibreOffice, and the requests for support are already way down. Docs isn't perfect but it's definitely better than LO if you have a modern browser and are doing basic word processing.

mmmm yes tell me more about the free software on the apple store

My mom bought a Windows Tablet. I had just dismissed it before. However, I started using it. The UI was great - fast, responsive and clean. Sure, the app choice is nothing like in it is iOS. But it had all the most common apps and did everything it was supposed to. Who thought so? Face palm moment

In other news, my Windows machines crashes much lesser than my Mountain Lion machine. Go figure.

Alternate title: "Attention Silicon Valley: Office and Windows are Not Quite Dead Yet"

Or "Most Computer Users Don't Care What's Cool, Just What Works"

It only works because that's the schools dated and closed ecosystem

Because they run Windows? That's a bit myopic.

I hate to break it to you but MS Office is here to stay. There are no good alternatives to it for the average user.

Are there actually any schools that don't use Microsoft products?

Nearly all the machines at my university are Windows machines. The CS department has Linux machines in the labs (alongside Windows machines). There are a few Macs around, but all the other machines run Windows. My job also provides Windows machines almost exclusively (there are some Macs and tablets for testing).

Or "Here's An Anecdote Completely Unsupported By Any Data"

That's correct, and probably why Windows RT has such a small portion of the tablet market.

'Person handed machine, finds uses for it.'

"Local man tries Windows RT, doesn't hate it."

4.5% tablet marketshare (http://www.winbeta.org/news/windows-8-and-windows-rt-account...) is tiny, but big enough to account for anecdotes like this.

Seems like a case of that school being already heavily invested in Microsoft programs, and being very hard to use anything else there. This is why institutions and organizations need to open up to alternatives, otherwise they'll always be stuck with using stuff from the same vendor over and over again.

Give me the option to run desktop apps on it (just a few, a terminal, recompiled open source stuff, self-compiled stuff for my work), and I'll seriously consider buying one.

You sound like you want the Ubuntu Edge.

The Windows RT is supposed to be competitive with iPads; i.e. they expect developers to re-tool their apps to work well with touch in WPF and/or Silverlight.

Surface Pro does it, but at a higher price point for certain.

Doesn't Surface Pro even have a fan? For me, it's a PC then.

Surface Pro is a PC. An old school tablet PC, same as we've had since since Windows XP Tablet Edition.

It's like a PC with a really crappy keyboard, unless you buy one that increases the price to the point where you should've bought a tablet notebook in the first place.

Chromebook with Chrubuntu might work

Check out the XDA forums - a very simple bit flip allows installation of any (unsigned) ARM binaries and most open source projects have already been ported/recompiled.

Edit: Links: "Jail break" tool: http://forum.xda-developers.com/showthread.php?t=2092158

Ported apps: http://forum.xda-developers.com/showthread.php?t=2092348

Well, actually, if you already have recompiled ARM exes, you can quite easily 'jailbreak' the RT to have them run. I have Notepad++, 7-zip, putty and a few others.

I know you were trying to say that this should be enabled by default, but I thought you might want to know that it's at the very least possible.

Why not buy one of the Win8 tablets using Intel's Clover Trail?

I have one, a ThinkPad Tablet 2, and it's been pretty awesome for me. (It's the computer I'm using to type this reply. I find the Win8 touchscreen keyboard works much better for me than the iPad's ever did.)

Asus has just announced it's abandoning Windows RT.

http://allthingsd.com/20130730/asus-pulling-back-on-windows-...

Samsung and Acer has said so earlier, too. And Microsoft took almost a billion dollar hit on it (and probably more losses to come). Windows RT is dead.

I've noticed many of the "old PC companies" are starting to aggressively support Android, and there's also a rumored massive wave of Chromebooks in the second half of this year, from most of the big PC OEM's.

> Windows RT is dead.

I doubt it. I like to remind people that Microsoft historically takes 3 tries to get something right.

Three tries later, it's dead.

Zune. Windows Live. PlaysForSure. Spot watches...

Zune ideas became Windows Phone. Windows Live was rebranded.

As far as Spot watches... I think I speak for many people here, "what"? Some random minor product line from a decade ago?

Well, actually, they had a few kicks at Zune (2, I still love my HD) before launching Windows Phone, which would have been the 3rd kick, which is normally when they get it right. At this point, they're at kick 2 on the Phone, and making progress, but still have a long way to go.

Spot was Microsoft's attempt to kick-start the "internet of things": http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spot_watch

Once again another thing where Microsoft was in the right place at the wrong time, and didn't follow-through on their initial work, instead leaving it in the ditch so that years later the press can be worked into a frothy fever over this very thing.

Apple did this with the Newton, it's true, but lately they've shown a lot more discipline in only launching things they're absolutely committed to. There hasn't been a Mac Cube in a long time.

My brother has a chrome pixel and it's pretty much the google equivalent of the Surface RT. Beautiful hardware, few, if any good apps. Google should beef up it's app market or allow existing android apps to be run on chrome OS or it'll meet the same fate. Full disclosure: I have a Surface RT that i love, though would enjoy much more if the app market was more developed.

The author fails to mention tablets with an Atom CPU as an alternative. They cost pratically the same as similar ARM tablets and give you the option of running x86 software.

To date RT has been a failure. You can't rewrite history.

Forced to use Office and only Office, eh? When there are plenty of free alternatives? What a racket. Perhaps they can be sued.

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