Did Microsoft Simply Run Out of Time On Windows RT? 305
CWmike writes "Microsoft may have simply run out of time with Windows RT, Directions on Microsoft analyst Michael Cherry said on Friday. Windows RT, the name Microsoft slapped on the OS earlier this week after calling it 'Windows on ARM,' or WOA, for months, is the forked version of Windows 8 designed to run on devices powered by ARM SoCs, or system-on-a-chip. Cherry was referring to gaps in Windows RT's feature set, particularly the lack of 'domain joining,' the ability to connect to a corporate Windows network and the lack of support for Group Policies, one of the ways IT administrators use to manage Windows devices. 'This is pure speculation on my part, but it seems like they had to make a trade-off with Windows RT,' Cherry said. 'What we're hearing now about Windows RT is a function of time and how they wanted the thing to behave. It seems to me that the a key goal was to get battery life decent and keep the weight [of devices] down.' His analysis on RT's chance of success: 'I think you can take Windows RT off the table for enterprises,' he said."
Re:No. (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:No. (Score:1, Interesting)
But the iPad has enterprise features and is seeing increased adoption in that section of the market. It already has over 80% adoption in Fortune 100 companies according to Network World and is part of an overall trend in IT toward letting employees use what they want rather than company-issued devices like the Blackberry. Microsoft would most certainly be aware of this, but I think they just didn't have the time to address it.
The insane insistence on "Windows" (Score:4, Interesting)
I have to disagree that Microsoft ran out of time. They just have an insane insistence that everything must but "Windows" even the Windows model doesn't fit. For style of tablets that compete with the iPad, they don't have to be desktops like Windows or OS X. Yet MS felt that they needed to spend development to shove the tablet model into Windows and label it as Windows 8. If MS focused on creating a new OS just for the tablet, they might have worked out all the enterprise features instead.
To clarify the article, Windows programs will run on Windows RT and Windows 8 but only if written specifically that way. Legacy programs are important to the vast majority of enterprises and are not compatible with Windows RT. So Windows RT was never going to be legacy compatible, why do they need to rewrite the desktop Windows model just to call it all "Windows".
The best use case I can see for Windows 8 hybrid approach is unfortunately something that MS has done in the past but never worked out. Hybrid tablet/laptops would have been great for Windows 8. But there is nothing on the horizon that remotely fits this vision. Intel is pushing for ultrabooks favoring less weight and more power efficiency instead of multi-touch transformable tablets. Seems like MS designed an OS for hardware that doesn't exist and even if it did is a very small percentage of users instead of optimizing for the hardware that is in the near future.
Comment removed (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:No. (Score:5, Interesting)
But the iPad can't either! (Score:3, Interesting)
Bill
Windows CE all over? (Score:4, Interesting)
It seems as if Windows 8 for ARM is simply turning in to another Windows CE. That is, it is a fork rather than a direct port of the Windows OS with many unique differences.
Back in the NT 4 days you could sit at a DEC Alpha machine and not even notice you were running on a different architecture until you tried to run an x86 executable. (Even then it could run 16-bit Windows 3.1 via an emulator that visually looked exactly the same as running a 16-bit program on NT 4 x86 and later there was FX32) The point is it had the same functionality as the other ports.
Comment removed (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:It does support enterprise (Score:3, Interesting)
I love taking my rooted 32 GB nook color tablet with a samba server to my linux class and turning it on for my classmates to connect to during the 4 hour class. I just serve small books, utilities etc, but its nice to have.
Not everything needs to go through the internet when you can carry small, relevant bubbles of it with you. Stop thinking of tablets of these dumb terminals, thats retarded (no pun). They push and pull, can local process, all kinds of funky computing fun on the go and its all backed up by the biggest iron the planet has ever seen and its only going to get bigger!. Widen the scope of what you think tablets should be.
Re:Windows CE all over? (Score:4, Interesting)
Windows on ARM is far closer to Windows 8 than Windows CE ever was to NT. CE was a clean-slate implementation, maybe borrowing some NT code. Windows on ARM seems to be more similar to something aking to XP Home or Media Center Edition, with the extra twist of another architecture and an arbitrary group policy decision (it's nothing more, really) not to allow third-party binaries in the traditional Windows GUI (e.g. only Metro apps). It is even so that Win32 API calls will be allowed for some Metro apps, including web browsers, even on ARM.
So, in the end, it is a marketing and feature set decision. Apple has been successful with the walled-garden approach, and that's what Windows RT will be marketed as, with the slight bonus of offering the "real" Microsoft Office.
Re:It's a huge undertaking (Score:4, Interesting)
I think the Vista debacle taught them that simply patching later on down the road won't help the product reputation any (seriously - Apple's growth w/ OSX really took off when Vista released). I also suspect that Microsoft can't afford to have too many turns at saying: "yeah it's a major missing feature, but we can always patch that in later".
This isn't 1999 anymore. There's actual competition out there now, and Microsoft can ill afford to have such a blase' attitude towards the consumer, *or* the enterprise.
Re:Airprint (Score:3, Interesting)
yea printing from ipad or any ios device sucks
but once I jailbroke my ipod touch and my ipad and use the printing stack on cydia omg it's like night and day, I have 100% total control over printing and can print anything, even using my wireless canon pixma mp560 using the jailbreak app i can tell my canon to print double sided and set all the properties as if i were on my windows desktop adjusting them.
jailbroken idevices is where the real power is at, once i jailbroke my ipod touch and got the new bluetooth stack and program called airblue It gives me full control over the bluetooth in the device, where before apple would only let idevices speak with each other when it came to file transfer idevice to idevice and only specific bluetooth devices such as headsets and gps systems.
but with airblue from cydia on a jailbroken device you get full bluetooth control, I can transfer photos from my LG cell phone to my ipod touch via bluetooth, and can pair with any gps device or even use my cellphone as a gps device. I can also tether internet access using bluetooth now.
So if I'm not near any wifi hotspot, I can use my cellphone as a hotspot with bluetooth, connect my ipad or ipod touch to the cellphone via bluetooth jailbroken app and can use my cellphone as the hotspot to hop online and do whatever.
If apple unlocked their devices they'd be more popular and more powerful... There is no way in hell I'd stay with a walled garden idevice, they are shit on their own.
but jailbroken you can unlock full power of them, hell for fun I even compiled apache on my ipod and installed piratebox, so even when it's in my pocket people can connect to my ipod like a hot spot, they are automatically given a webpage with files they can download, google piratebox :)
Re:No. (Score:2, Interesting)
Active Directory is the problem.
Times are changing. People are working from home, on the road, and from other devices that are wireless. How does IT manage it? They can't. AD is static and not tablet or work from home family.
The fact that these enterprises are still using IE 6 and 7 are showing the problem. They can't leave as it is unmanageable if you have 5,000 people in 4 continents.
Windows 8 solution is to simply reset it to a previous state. That might work fine for every problem if all your data is on the cloud anyway. WinRT helps this. Zdnet (Windows troll I know) had an article demonstrating this [zdnet.com].
I think a new manageability services that work with a hotmail or office365 account that can be managed over the internet might be an excellent replacement. Standard desktops frozen in time are the worst for everyone and become hard to manage as you lock them down.
You're not a cross platform kinda guy, I see ... (Score:5, Interesting)
It would be very different, because Linux was written from the ground up by competent engineers with portability in mind. Windows was written by some very competent engineers, and many more with -shall we say - much less competence. In order to port Windows to ARM they have to find every place where an assumption was made about internal representation of data structures, word size, endian-ness, and a host of other issues.
Initially NT was DEC Alpha and x86, but they scrapped Alpha support. The reason is simple. Writing portable code, especially in languages like C and C++ take skill, significant effort, and additional time. Obviously, a company that couldn't be bothered to put the time and effort into develop secure code could not be bothered to invest the effort to make it portable either.
Re:No. (Score:3, Interesting)
> too many resources while running, too many threads or memory, or
Very plausible, but also...
> Tablets are not very secure and easy to steal.
This.
On a Microsoft Active Directory network, information about *all* accounts on the system, including the domain administrator accounts, is stored on every device that is allowed to join the domain. That includes information about the passwords. (Why? Because if a domain controller goes down and suddenly every single computer in the department can't log in, people become very upset. A more sane approach, from a security perspective, would be to only give each local system account information for accounts that have recently been used to log into that local system; but AFAIK Active Directory doesn't do things that way. Certainly as of Windows XP it didn't, and if that has changed I missed it.)
The passwords are not stored in the clear, but the information that is stored would be a significant boon to an attacker if he could walk away with it and do some processing for a while (say, on a botnet) and come back to log in next week or next month. Joining the domain in the first place is a security barrier -- you need a domain administrator's permission to join any computer to the domain. Once the computer is joined to the domain, however, it gets domain information, including account information, including hashed passwords. If an attacker can compromise ANY of the computers on the domain -- by, for example, physically removing their hard drive and plugging it into another computer -- he can bypass such things as login retry timeouts and thus can test as many passwords per second as he pleases, limited only by computing resources (chiefly, CPU time).
(He might possibly even be able to use massive precalculated hash tables, if MSAD still doesn't use salt. I don't happen to know whether it does or not. It certainly SHOULD, but with backward compatibility being crucial to Microsoft's business, *especially* in the enterprise, I wouldn't be altogether shocked to the core if there were no salt, or if it were turned off by default and you had to deliberately disable compatibility with older OS versions to turn it on. Anybody who happens to know, feel free to chime in here.)
So yeah, laptops on a MSAD domain are probably a bad enough idea in most cases, but tablets would be worse. This doesn't mean Microsoft won't figure out a way to make tablets on the domain happen (I'm sure they will, eventually), but now that they're trying to take security (somewhat more) seriously, they may be trying to sort out these kinds of implications first. If so, that would be a good thing.
Re:No. (Score:3, Interesting)
They could be but I'd say that's a bad bet - trying to "out Apple" Apple.
Microsoft has always had advantages in existing software compatibility and enterprise security features (say what you will - Windows Mobile had many more security features than Android or iOS for a long time). They seem to be casting off their only real differentiators in an attempt to copy the success of the iPad. This will fail spectacularly.
What nonsense. There are a whole host of Windows x86 tablets coming with full touch support and with new form factors which will be fully compatible with existing software and enterprise features of PCs.
And not to mention the fact that the author doesn't mention the enterprise features that Windows RT has. http://blogs.msdn.com/b/b8/archive/2012/04/19/managing-quot-byo-quot-pcs-in-the-enterprise-including-woa.aspx [msdn.com]
Very telling that the author is Gregg Keizer, who was involved in the scandals with faking Windows benchmarks to drive page hits. http://www.zdnet.com/blog/btl/why-we-dont-trust-devil-mountain-software-and-neither-should-you/31024 [zdnet.com]
And the submitter is CWMike, from Computer World. They know that Slashdot laps up anti-MSFT FUD and thus they use it to write drivel and get page hits from Slashdot. And judging from the comments, they're very successful in manipulating Slashdot for their own gains as they've historically with the fake benchmarks.
That's right - I need to look at this more, but you people should give MS a HELL of a lot more credit for what they are doing here. BYOD is the security nightmare du jour, ever since the iPad came out. Our security team have spent huge resources, and are still woefully under-resourced to make managing these devices day in day out remotely safe enough. The last thing you'd want to see, and the first thing you'd demand - from an info sec perspective - is that AD not be baked into this consumer oriented OS. Until Win RT is a couple years old every security team worth their salt would nix any directory / infrastructure tie up with a device which is easily lost, unhardened (at least through painful experience) and virtually an Alpha product.Yes it can be done, but the overhead is massive and most people wont have the headcount to secure bridging the two safely - and KEEPING THEM SAFE. Releasing in this form provides entry to a consumer market, and a platform which has a lot of the headache of apps installed from Lines of Business fixed through the separate publishing infrastructure (which the original article is ignorant of, or lying). Staff get their tablets. It sounds to me that MS are getting a head start on Android and iOS. Read the link the guy above posted. They have provided a tiered, clean way of getting business apps to a consumer device. It still requires security risk assessments and penetration testing of the apps (which would need hella strong authentication / 2FA for anything which holds sensitive or above data, but the lack of the 'generic' client for the enterprise directory will make this much easier to deploy and work with than if they had tied things together with AD. It means more work - but thats what it takes, unless you want your firm to get owned.