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."
It does support enterprise (Score:5, Informative)
WinRT does have [msdn.com] central administration capabilities, just not as extensive as enterprise editions of Windows.
Re:No. (Score:5, Informative)
They had ARM-based code to join domains and apply system policies in NT4... this isn't some new reinvention of the wheel like "WinFS" was, this is a porting of existing code to a different platform, one for which they already had working examples of code to compare against.
Quite aside from that, it's high level code. You do not need to write the algorithms to join an NT domain in assembly or machine code, you write it in C and compile it for the arch. Porting a Linux distro to ARM does not mean rewriting the code from the ground up, it means recompiling with different flags... why would it be any different for Windows?
Re:It does support enterprise (Score:4, Informative)
The real question is: why would you want an ARM powered Windows Tablet anyway? With Medfield http://www.anandtech.com/show/5365/intels-medfield-atom-z2460-arrive-for-smartphones/1 [anandtech.com] we're already seeing x86 not only competitive but actually besting some ARM devices for performance and battery life.
Corporations are going to want backwards compatibility in applications and other x86 capabilities. If corporations need the full group policies and enterprise features they can just buy a full copy of Windows 8 Enterprise.
If I was a corporate IT department I would prefer to support a single Windows version instead of trying to stay on top of both x86 and ARM updates and glitches.
Re:No. (Score:5, Informative)
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.
Re:No. (Score:3, Informative)
Not quite. NT3.x/4.x supported x86, Dec Alpha, MIPS, and PPC processors. It did not support ARM or SPARC. And, of course, they dropped support for all except x86. They did have support for ARM in Windows CE/Mobile, but whether that ever included code to join domains or Active Director, I can't say for sure.
Re:Just keep waving the hands (Score:5, Informative)
Take some time to read this:
http://blogs.msdn.com/b/b8/archive/2012/04/19/managing-quot-byo-quot-pcs-in-the-enterprise-including-woa.aspx [msdn.com]
There are a whole host of enterprise features that Windows RT supports.
If they're not enough, you can get a Windows 8 x86 tablet, which will support anything that a desktop PC currently supports.
Why didn't the article link to that blog post or talk about it? It's plain FUD targeted at people like you and the MS haters have lapped it up hook, line and sinker like they've done with the author's previous articles. I am sure you can make a case that the features are not enough, but not even mentioning them AT ALL shows that it's a FUD article designed to drive page hits.
See the submitter of this fake benchmark article:
http://tech.slashdot.org/firehose.pl?op=view&type=story&sid=10/02/18/0429258 [slashdot.org]
Look at the submitter of this Slashdot story. It's the same Computer World guy.
Here's Slashdot post about how the above article was a fake.
http://news.slashdot.org/story/10/02/21/2329249/windows-7-memory-usage-critic-outed-as-fraud [slashdot.org]
Re:No. (Score:5, Informative)
No, it can't. The only tablet I'm aware of that can do any sort of enterprise auth out of the box (against Active Directory) is the Lenovo Thinkpad tablet (Android). You can use your AD password to lock/unlock the device. They also preload a Citrix client into the tablets.
Re:No. (Score:4, Informative)
Re:No. (Score:3, Informative)
What about the time when the various components of Office were Mac-only programs and there was no Windows? Yeah, I'm talking about that tiny sliver of time called 1985. Excel was Mac-first, and for a while, Mac-only.
Scary, but it explains a lot about why Excel is as screwed up as it is. IIRC, Word and Excel were "ahead" on Mac until version 5.0, since Windows was not yet fully up to the task until 3.x.
Also, there was never a time when Office was "piped through some weird Win32 emulation". There was only a hack-job version of VBA on board. Nobody used it, since the old-school Applescript bindings were still there and still worked properly. The next version expanded on them and dropped VBA compatibility forever, to the frustration of Mac-supporting IT departments everywhere. Macros didn't work on the Mac, at least not the VBA ones with extra enterprise-y cream filling.
Re:No. (Score:3, Informative)
Only logon information about accounts that have logged on onto that device are being cached. Not all accounts, that would too resource intensive. Also that information is not obtained from a domain controller, but from user input.
So you can only compromise accounts that are used on that computer. However if you could steal a domain controller than you are correct. But the same goes for authentication servers from any other vendor.
Re:No. (Score:4, Informative)
Look up Windows NT on wikipedia retard...
And, when you read it, don't incorrectly infer from the fact that it mentions ARM support that the NT code base has supported ARM since Day One [slashdot.org]. The page for Darwin [wikipedia.org] lists ARM as a supported platform in the infobox, but that doesn't mean that there was ARM code in Darwin since Day One, and the page for Linux [wikipedia.org] lists ARM and a bunch of other architectures as supported platforms in the infobox, but that doesn't mean there was support for all those architectures in the Linux kernel since Day One.