Microsoft has hinted that it will kill off Windows RT, the version of windows made for chips based on ARM’s architecture.
Julie Larson-Green, the senior executive at Microsoft, said that the aim of Windows RT was "our first go at creating that more closed, turnkey experience [that Apple has on the iPad]…" but that Microsoft now has three mobile operating systems: "We have the Windows Phone OS. We have Windows RT and we have full Windows. We’re not going to have three."
The news came in September that Dell would be dropping its support for the RT operating system. With that backing gone, Windows RT was left with a small pool of support from other manufacturers.
The remarks were made at a UBS seminar, and appear to confirm the growing suspicions that Windows RT has been a failure both with OEMs PC makers and developers.
Only Microsoft and Nokia’s handset division, which is being acquired by Microsoft, make any RT devices. Microsoft had to write down $900m at the end of the June quarter on unsold Surface RT devices.
Experts have commented that they expect there to be no Surface 3 tablet, nor a successor to the Nokia 2520. They predict Windows RT being ‘quietly put to sleep’ in 2014.
A focus by Microsoft on Windows Phone and "full-fat" Windows – the latter able to run all the legacy applications from the past two decades – would simplify the company’s OS strategy.
Larson-Green explained the original aim of Windows RT: "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. 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."
