http://www.theguardian.com/technolog...t-larson-green

Apple has a near monopoly on the closed gadget but the G has gone with reporting 'kill' and an opinion saying "the decision to sideline RT".

""our first go at creating that more closed, turnkey experience [that Apple has on the iPad]…"

I'd more expect Windows Phone simply to become part of 'Windows RT' and Metro. Phablets are tablets as far as I am concerned.
But will they open it up ?

http://www.fudzilla.com/home/item/33...rating-systems

No nonsense headline there at Fudz.

"“We’re not going to have three. We do think there’s a world where there is a more mobile operating system that doesn’t have the risks to battery life, or the risks to security,” she said."

Whilst that single brand already exists in the word 'Windows' it does look like we simply get Metro for all consumers in their laptops, tablets and phones. Maybe the full OS PC brand will end up being called something like 'Windows for Business/Development'.

So Windows Phone and Windows RT will become one and the same? That's really the way it should have always been. Same OS for tablets and phones/phablets/etc. just like the other platforms.

Yes,it makes sense. But MS did not have this option. They wanted to bring ARM tablets on the market, but all they had was Windows Phone 7 at the time, which was pretty Spartan as for features and UI. Also different divisions were working on WP8 and W8/RT each having their own goals. Which is now different. I am guessing the new OS will be a hybrid of WP8 and W8 RT, supporting APIs of both, There's the whole desktop part in Windows RT that will have to go and what's left will merge with WP rather well IMO.

Does that mean Windows Phone as is will be made obsolete yet again ?
It is a trait that dates back to Win Ce and later Windows Mobile 2003.

That initial mention of less malware via the zero user access model does leave plenty of ambiguity.

They really want that closed ecosystem, don't they. I think there will be more changes for tablets than for phones, WP8 GDR 3 is finally getting where WP8 should have been from the beginning.

Microsoft are just no damm good at much of anything.

They got lucky.

They are the George Lucas of operating systems.

Larson-Green, who is executive vice-president of Devices and Studios 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]…"

I'm having turnkey experience with all the trimmings this christmas!.... mmm, turnkey gravy.

They had their opportunity with Windows Mobile. They had a growing market share, but they made 2 simple flaws and killed it stone dead:

1. They took much much too long to create Windows Phone 7
2. They made it a completely different code base to WM6, meaning hardware couldn't be updated, and developers couldn't easily develop for it, if they were set up for WM.

Because it took them so long to do 1. most WM developers had moved on to iOS and Android, which was relatively easy to do as all of them could be developed for using a base of C++.

Too little, too late, and the wrong choices again. It's not the first time Microsoft have done that.

Just look at the money that Google and Apple make via adverts etc.

ARM brought technology towards its commodity price, so now they also need to pervade the whole offline and online system like Apple.and Google.

Windows Mobile wasn't really growing that much. A tiny percentage of smartphone sales, let alone phone sales - weren't Nokia at 90+% share and MS at well under 10% or something like that?

Windows Mobile was just MS being themselves. Some idiot decided that "ooh yes, we should have a start button based interface, make it look like our desktop systems". They have yet to figure that desktop and mobile should not have exactly the same interface. What works on one does not work on the other. The '95 style interface didn't work on mobiles. The Metro interface that appears to work okay on mobiles doesn't work well on the desktop.

Nothing wrong with a new code base, and by all accounts WP is pretty nippy (unlike what Apple are doing these days with the increasingly bloated iOS).

And when you talk about "most WM developers", they were a pretty small bunch to start off with ....

Microsoft made a mistake to be honest. They should have evolved Windows 7 as it was, and combined Windows RT and Windows Phone into one mobile OS which could run on tablets and phones.

Combining Windows with a tablet interface has had mixed results. There's the saying "jack of all trades, master of none" and that's what Windows 8 is. It can do desktop and tablet functions, but whether it does those functions adequately is another story.

What they should have done is rebranded Windows Phone and Windows RT under one name with a linked Windows Store shared between them. The OS should have shared the same code on both phones and tablets, and maybe they could have kept the limited desktop function of Windows RT when the OS was in tablet mode. That way there would have been far more focus on apps, instead of dumping Windows on ARM where none of the x86 apps can run.

Microsoft are lucky in that they have sufficient cash to make mistake after mistake after mistake. In fact, so much cash that they never seem to learn from their mistakes.

I did originally think that RT and WP were going to be sharing a code base. i mean it does actually make sense, whereas what they actually did makes absolutely no sense. But then I forgot, the sensible way isn't how MS do anything ....

I totally agree with this. On one hand one has to ask why go into trouble to port Windows to ARM if you disable running native apps on it except those that MS delivers. On the other it can be nice to use a functionality available in big Windows. Just yesterday I scheduled a job to sync with internet time server daily, because I get a difference ~1 minute in a week. Nothing easier atm. As for the rest of your post I think it's exactly what's going to happen.

Two different divisions were working on this, each having their own goals and agendas. Hopefully they learnt from this, at last.

I have a Surface RT and I can tell you it is a very frustrating experience.

Having got used to both PCs and Android having a very open platform, I like the ability to search for apps and customise my phone/laptop as I see fit.

If RT was meant to be a closed, inflexible environment, then MS was 100% successful, and I hate it!

I wonder what will happen to the RT1 and RT2 hardware when (and I think it is When, not If) MS decide to stop RT development/support?

That will take a while. It took 3 versions of Windows for it to catch on, they are not going to abandon ARM tablets just because they struggle atm. The existing hardware is okay to run anything that will come after RT 8.1.

Many factions in Microsoft wanted WP8 to be the phone/tablet OS to go up against iOS and Android. However at the time, Microsoft was organised in product groups and each group wants to do its own thing. Steven Sinofsky wanted to develop his own stuff as the big, powerful chief of Windows.

Steve Ballmer has reorganised Microsoft along functional lines so now Terry Myerson (who was in charge of Windows Phone engineering) is now in charge of all Operating System engineering at Microsoft so now they have the right internal structure to merge the two OSes and not have this sort of thing happening again.

THe more I think about it the more I got back to my very original
thoughts that full Windows is the one to disappear.

Start still does not show programs, even on x86 Windows so they do certainly hanker to get shot of it. It is very much why consumers did not get what they wanted when flabbergasted by 8.
Receiving 30% of everyone else's enterprise means they can go the Android/Apple freemium OS route.

That might finally push me to try Linux!

I don't think it will happen soon. And you will always need a powerful development environment where you can do more than just point at things.