The Quest For The Why Of Windows RT

In the beginning, Microsoft released the Surface RT. This made a lot of people very angry and has been widely regarded as a bad move.

Hitchhikers references aside, The Surface RT along with Windows 8 seem to be the biggest Microsoft failures in recent memory.

Windows 8 RT and the Surface RT were Microsoft's attempt at making a lightweight, low power, ARM processor based, media consumption tablet. If their Surface Pro models were intended to take on the likes of the MacBook Air and other ultraportables, the RT equivalent was almost certainly designed to take on the iPad and Android tablets. These were marketed as a "Get stuff done" tablet as an afterthought, but that idea was mainly used alongside the Pro models.

History shows that RT tablets sold poorly and nobody quite understood what the angle was with Microsoft and the OS spinoff. Why not just use atom processors and make low powered x86 netbook competitors? Why ARM, which breaks compatability with all existing Windows applications outside of the ones in the Windows Marketplace? Why Why Why?

To date, there's no clear cut explanation. RT just sounds like a bad move all together. Is it though? Could there be some nefarious ulterior motive? I think yes, and my jumping point for this topic is a strange one.

Who remembers the Ubuntu Edge concept? This was a crowd funding attempt by the open source Linux distribution to create a very unique phone. The device was said to come packing incredibly high specifications rivaling most laptop computers. The most intriguing part of the device was what it could do when it was tired of being a phone. This device could dock to a screen, mouse, and keyboard via USB and become a full fledged desktop computer. The phone would automatically boot in to a desktop mode which was literally a desktop operating system. Everything you could run on any other distribution of Ubuntu linux, you could run on this phone while docked. Alas, the crowdfund failed but it did spark some interest in the community for a device with those capabilities.

Fast forward back to present day. Microsoft just purchased Nokia and now has the ability to make their own Surface phone. As a rule of thumb, most phones (see: nearly all) are based on ARM processors, not x86.

Microsoft is keeping Windows RT around despite almost unanimous hatred from partners and consumers alike. I don't agree with many decisions made by Microsoft in recent years, but there has to be a method to the madness here. I've got my tinfoil hat on proudly, and I'm willing to bet that Microsoft is going to bring the Ubuntu Edge legacy to reality.

I figure they're going to load Windows 8 RT on to a separate memory chip inside the device. When the device is detected as being docked, the phone will switch over to "desktop mode" and load RT, which will offer users a full PC experience they are already extremely familiar with. Once Windows 8 / 8.1 start gaining more market share, more of the apps people use on a daily basis will become available through the Windows Market place (and thus, available on ARM and x86 devices alike). You will be able to take your entire computer with you wherever you go without any problems.

At the 2013 Microsoft Company Meeting, it was revealed that there are already plans to merge the Windows Phone and Windows 8 / RT App repositories in to one centralized "store". All of this seems to strongly point at my conclusion being correct.

Again, I'm not an industry insider. I have no idea if this is legit or not. As of right now, this is all just a nerd speculating on the internet. I must say this is an insanely cool idea. If something as "obscure" as linux could gather mainstream attention from the idea, I can only imagine what Microsoft could accomplish if they follow through with this.

Monkeys, Binary, and Missing Meaning.

As I look for new employment and the adventures that come along with it, I've been spending a lot of late nights on the computer. Going to bed between 3 and 5 am, sleeping till late afternoon, rinse and repeat. Recently my dad woke up to take a pee one night and asked me what I was doing up so late.

"Just messing around. Like usual"

He kind of chuckled and said that I looked like I was really looking hard for something. Trying to figure something out or find something I lost. I didn't really give it much thought until I finally went to bed for the night several hours later.

His words got me thinking. I don't exactly stare at myself in mirrors so I don't know what I look like while "internetting". I'm never searching for anything in particular either, with exceptions to the times I'm actually working on a project. Am I searching for something without even realizing it?

By now we've all heard of the infinite monkey theorem. You know, the one that says if you put an infinite number of monkeys in a room with infinite time and infinite typewriters, the monkeys would eventually produce the complete works of William Shakespeare.

Taking that and combining it with a technological perspective, binary has a similar possibility. Everything computers do these days, be it playing a song or rendering a full length video game, is all done at the very basic level by binary code. The higher level code is translated to code that tells the processor which of its trillions of transistors to turn on or off. Everything that can be rendered digitally can be expressed using a bunch of zeroes and ones. Taking that further, if you have an infinitely large hard drive, and fill it endlessly with every binary combination possible, you could create a digital representation of anything ever. The best movie ever made, the future version of windows, or a treasured family memory that never existed. Everything can be made possible through the right combination of those two oddly significant numbers.

Recent numbers have shown that approximately 1/3 of the world's population is now active on the internet. Each one contributing their own strings of zeroes and ones to the massive pot we call the world wide web. Assuming 7 billion total people on earth, that means about 2.3 billion people are active on the internet (and increasing rapidly).

Usually humans can communicate ideas face to face, but the digital age has made this infinitely easier. Ideas now transcend time and space and you can access an idea from someone you never met that was created several years in the past. You can also collaborate instantaneously with anybody nearly anywhere through this connection and contribute. The internet is the complete aggregate of all human knowledge, and can be accessed anywhere at any time. Nearly every idea, every fact, every thing ever. If a human has said it, thought it, heard it, recorded it, or crossed paths with it in any way, its probably somewhere on the internet in some form. I realized this fact a while ago and it has never ceased amazing me since.

So keeping that idea in mind, is it so far fetched that some part of my brain is searching for meaning without me even realizing? What makes humanity so significant is our inherent curiosity. We don't want to just sit on earth and fly through space at a million miles an hour. We want to know why things work the way they do. We want to control our surroundings to our liking. Its evolution on steroids. Maybe all of us, up until the wee hours of the morning on the computer, are all subconsciously looking for something. For meaning perhaps? For inspiration? For motivation? Companionship? Justification? Something that we don't quite know how to express? Maybe this is the next stage in our intellectual evolution.

Or maybe the internet is just a place for cat pictures and we're all just cursed with ADD. I'm okay with that too.

What lies beneath the Surface?

With the release of Windows 8, most of the tech world has come to the conclusion that touch interfaces and tablets are here to stay.

The next stage of Microsoft's Windows evolution was the line of Surface branded tablet PCs. This was their hero device for their new OS and it was released with this ad:

Well, that sucked.

Why? Well it didn't actually TELL me anything about the device they were selling. Why should I care about this thing? Will it teach me to dance and twerk like the hip young kids are doing? Probably not.

No, this is a computer and computers are devices to help make your life easier. How will this new device differ from my current aging Dell laptop? Furthermore, how does this differ from the huge variety of released Windows 8 touch laptops? The ad fails to tell me. It grabbed my attention but at the end of the day I'm still clueless as to what they're selling. Actually, that's wrong. I'm a nerd and keep up with this. When my grandmother saw this, she simply commented on the funny dancing and went back to watching Dancing with the Stars or something. 

THAT particular advertisement was followed up with this one: 

This one is for their "Pro" line of Surface devices. This one is a bit more focused on the capabilities of the device showing it being used to do something with spreadsheets and charts and I'm fairly sure I saw a flash of the mail app in there.

Again, same overall problem. Too much dancing. Not enough persuasion. How does this dancemachine outrank dell's latest plastic computer? I don't know!

I understand Microsoft is trying to appeal to a more youthful audience with these things. I guess you can call them the iPad generation. However, this is not the way to do it. Apple commercials always make it a point to show you what you can DO with the devices. They show how these devices can take the mundane things you do daily and make them FUN AND INNOVATIVE. 

Microsoft needs to take a hint from that approach. Sure, make it cool and dancetastic, but also show how this thing can be used in day to day activities. So many companies have a difficult time doing this and I've always felt that it results in decreased sales. Finding that fine line between functionality and entertainment is the key to successful marketing.