Microsoft have always eaten their own dogfood. That's where Server and Office and Project came from...and obviously, Visual Studio.
Giving RT devices to employees continues this tradition. It's also evidence that this is an enterprise strategy, not B2C.
I used Windows 2.0. I was using WordPerfect when the first versions of Word were being developed. Surface is an MVP.
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A Note about Xbox. The way Microsoft handled the RRoD issue was pure B2B. They made it right for people out of warranty. Their choice of three years was the same as the period over which businesses depreciate assets. A B2C response would have been, "You should have purchased XboxCare."
If its an enterprise play, how come its software doesn't tie into the enterprise? No outlook, no power in Office, no AD integration: these are all things critical in the enterprise.
MS is certainly going to take the intel-based Surface into the enterprise. This one seems like a weird chimaera, sitting between the enterprise world and the consumer world. And that won't capture the average tablet buyer's imagination.
That's a good question. The answer I think is that Microsoft's ARM strategy is long term.
Instead of kludging around in the OS, you refactor Outlook, Office, Active Directory, etc. to better address the new reality of less powerful devices becoming prevalent. Clearly that's already happening as Microsoft pursues improvements in the cloud. It is also the same direction the companies the techpress love to compare them against - Apple and Google - are pursuing.
Microsoft's bet is that they will be better at delivering cloud services to enterprise (and thereby to consumers). I think the evidence makes this a pretty safe bet.
The Surface Rt is prefect when using RDP and Citrix.. It could use a higher resolution screen and maybe go down in price a bit... But it works pretty well as a thin client.
We'll have to disagree about your concept of what B2C means. MS did the right thing by its customers for RRoD; I wouldn't call that B2-anything.
My point was that the Xbox was /designed/ from the ground up -- from the choice of components to the way the OS is booted and managed -- to be a consumer product. The Surface, not so much. And it shows.
Edit: Let me be a little more concrete.
Xbox: No registry. Registries suck; they become corrupt, they're hard to manage, they accumulate bloat and mystery. If a consumer has to deal with a registry, it's epic fail time.
Surface: A couple weeks ago my wife was editing the registry on her Surface in attempt to recover it. OMFG.
Xbox: A pretty decent security story, with decent support in the OS.
Surface: That's cute, guys.
Xbox: Turn it off accidentally? Trip over the power cord? No problem.
Surface: What are these things you call . . . "transactions"?
The Xbox pricing also showed some backbone. I don't know what the Surface people were thinking.
Giving RT devices to employees continues this tradition. It's also evidence that this is an enterprise strategy, not B2C.
I used Windows 2.0. I was using WordPerfect when the first versions of Word were being developed. Surface is an MVP.
[edit]
A Note about Xbox. The way Microsoft handled the RRoD issue was pure B2B. They made it right for people out of warranty. Their choice of three years was the same as the period over which businesses depreciate assets. A B2C response would have been, "You should have purchased XboxCare."
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