Microsoft’s Windows RT didn’t win a great many friends when it first burst onto the scene and has endured a pretty turbulent existence ever since. Consumers didn’t really understand it, OEMs overlooked it in favour of the standard Windows OS and most devices carrying RT struggled to gain a footing…as continues to be the case today.
Could it therefore be said that Microsoft should have never bothered with RT in the first place? Perhaps, as precisely such a sentiment seems to be shared by one particular Redmond executive who this week gave the hint that RT’s days are very much numbered.
Julie Larson-Green, Microsoft’s executive vice-president of Devices and Studios, discussed the future of the Windows RT platform at a seminar earlier this week, stating at one point that calling RT ‘Windows’ in the first place was a big mistake.
She described RT as Microsoft’s “first go at creating that more closed, turnkey experience” but would go on to admit that things hadn’t gone quite to plan.
“We have the Windows Phone OS. We have Windows RT and we have full Windows. We’re not going to have three,” she said.
“Windows on ARM, or Windows RT, was our first go at creating that more closed, turnkey experience [like the iPad], where it doesn’t have all the flexibility of Windows, but it has the power of Office and then all the new style applications,” said Larson-Green while clarifying the intent and purpose of the failed OS.
“So you could give it to your kid and he’s not going to load it up with a bunch of toolbars accidentally out of Internet Explorer and then come to you later and say, why am I getting all these pop-ups. It just isn’t capable of doing that by design,”
“So the goal was to deliver two kinds of experiences into the market, the full power of your Windows PC [on the Surface Pro], and the simplicity of a tablet experience that can also be productive. That was the goal. Maybe not enough,”
“I think we didn’t explain that super-well. I think we didn’t differentiate the devices well enough. They looked similar. Using them is similar. It just didn’t do everything that you expected Windows to do. So there’s been a lot of talk about it should have been a rebranding. We should not have called it Windows.”