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Comment by shin_lao | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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...

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.

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