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Thread: News - Windows RT cost cut for vendors is on the cards

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    News - Windows RT cost cut for vendors is on the cards

    Also Qualcomm says its Snapdragon 800 will be in some upcoming RT 8.1 devices.
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    Re: News - Windows RT cost cut for vendors is on the cards

    Microsoft is hoping that a cut in the price of Windows RT software to hardware vendors will help promote manufacture and growth of the platform. “People with knowledge of the matter” talking to Bloomberg said the price cut would be aimed at “small-sized” Windows RT devices.
    Dumb move - if they want RT devices to gain more of a foothold then they need to apply a price cut to the bigger RT systems too.

    Like the idea of this Snapdragon chip - presumably the fact that it does so much means that devices that use it have a lower component count, so can go for a lower price.

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    Re: News - Windows RT cost cut for vendors is on the cards

    M$ should give RT away for free...and that would be an Android Killer! :-P

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    Re: News - Windows RT cost cut for vendors is on the cards

    Make Outlook work on it would be a start
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    Re: News - Windows RT cost cut for vendors is on the cards

    Quote Originally Posted by Nikumba View Post
    Make Outlook work on it would be a start
    It seems kinda pointless to by a windows device and not run the 'normal' windows stuff on it.

    Compared to the other options available, because of my lack of knowledge & experience of devices, it doesnt interest at all.

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    Re: News - Windows RT cost cut for vendors is on the cards

    Quote Originally Posted by iamlorro View Post
    It seems kinda pointless to by a windows device and not run the 'normal' windows stuff on it. Compared to the other options available, because of my lack of knowledge & experience of devices, it doesnt interest at all.
    It's a good idea in theory - have a version of windows that can use widely-available ARM-based tech rather than being shackled to x86. And the sales pitch about being able to do that kind of Office stuff "out of the box" is pretty compelling - even against Android and iOS's much larger app choice.

    Unfortunately, as Nikumba points out, the actual execution of this was flawed. And MS don't appear to be falling over themselves in any haste to fix it. Although folks I know with RT systems seem to quite like them, especially when they're able to work around the shortcomings. Last person I spoke to was quite enthusiastic - suggesting that if MS can get more apps available then this, (not Android), will be the one to challenge the iPad.

    I have my doubts though...

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    Re: News - Windows RT cost cut for vendors is on the cards

    Quote Originally Posted by crossy View Post
    .... suggesting that if MS can get more apps available then this, (not Android), will be the one to challenge the iPad.

    I have my doubts though...
    That's a pretty big "if", and a critical problem. Chicken & Egg too, few apps = few users, and few users = few developers developing apps.

    Which, of course, explains MS's numpty decision to dump all over desktop users to leverage, or try to leverage, Windows.

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    Re: News - Windows RT cost cut for vendors is on the cards

    Quote Originally Posted by Saracen View Post
    Which, of course, explains MS's numpty decision to dump all over desktop users to leverage, or try to leverage, Windows.
    Worse is the way they are treating their developers.

    Notice in the phrase I used "their".... This is an important distinction.

    MS have some utterly brilliant technologies, they are just very expensive, for many, paying a £3k per year tax to use the latest and greatest, for development purposes only, is fine. To others it's against their religious ideals.

    Read half the criticisms of Silverlight, pretty much all of them focus on the fact its not free, many incorrectly talk about the lack of standardisation. Fact is, more and more, people are trying to create silverlight in HTML, the hacker news london even last month made me laugh as some guy's demoing his pet project, all I could think was, what a buggy, poorly designed attempt to implement the same ideals. A quick google later and yup, he is bitching on about silverlight, yet clearly hadn't used it.

    These people are the ones who effectively say other people can't have nice things, because they don't approve of them. This is fine and dandy, but if I'm trying to do business, I don't give a crap about paying £10k per year in fees, if it makes more than £10k of value over a FREE (as in beer or as in free) option. However these people don't want that happening, because my tacit endorsement of the technology would drive people away from their politically idealised ones.

    Right now, everyone is been told they will be writing apps in HTML... Ergh. Seriously, FML, it has come to this as a stack of technologies.

    So I need some cross browser support, better throw in JQuery, oh, my page takes too much bandwidth, better add in minify, okay, I want something that allows for MVVM because I don't want a pile of dog plop, right I'll load up Knockout, oh, its a bit rough round the edges, well I'll put in Kendo, hmm I am having problems with the AJAX events been flakey, better load in SignalR.

    God bloody damn it. I've now got 5 big moving parts, just to be able to do an "elegant" hello world ticker page. Seriously, don't you dare tell me that is nicer than Silverlight or WPF. Do I care that we are tying users to a platform, no. I do not run a website where each customer is worth 0.001$ a month, it's about a million times more than that.

    This is why all these HTML apps suck monkey nuts, they are so bloated before they have even begun.

    MEANWHILE AT THE SUPER MICROSOFT ADVENTURE LABS, some internal politics has gone on, the .Net team has had XAML markup taken away from them, it is now owned by the core team, so will be available to native, unmanaged code.

    This means they are re-inventing the same framework I've been using for 5 years. Thanks guys. It has that terrible sin of being familiar, yet subtly different. The downside is, it uses paradigms that are a lot harder for someone who hasn't programmed many languages to learn. I guess I'm been snobbish, but as a result, the veteran microsoft platform devs, don't like it, its too limited. The veteran devs from the land of iOS won't see the point of learning it, it would be rather challenging for them too, objectiveC rots the mind, I have yet to ever meet a good developer who didn't consider it cancer, this mixmash of Erland and Smalltalk with the worst syntax beating C++ for verbosity, whilst delivering performance worse than Smalltalk.

    So who will really bother to learn this framework and write apps? Not many. Microsoft had one big advantage in Windows Phone, they used some very familiar technologies, with tooling that is better than iOS or Android devs have (so long as you've got a few £K to spare!). That with the standardised platform means that despite market share, low end WP handsets have far more quality games and such apps than low end Android. Or rather, far more, than their market share deserves, due to the lower cost of development (I would churn out a complex WP app for about 1/4th the cost of an Android one, that android one as well would only be supported on listed handsets).

    This is why I think Microsoft screwed the pooch royally around the MUI framework. They desperately wanted to hug the Brogrammers, the people who knock something up in javascript, without realising, these are exactly the people you don't want writing code on your platform.

    Now excuse me whilst I go see how many thousands of lines of exploitable PHP code have been added to github this week.
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    Re: News - Windows RT cost cut for vendors is on the cards

    Feel better for that, TA? It's always good to get it off your chest.

    Seriously though, I don't disagree, for two reasons. First, I don't disagree, and second, I'm too out of touch to have a basis for disagreeing, anyway. My developing days (other than personal projects) are way behind me.

    BUT .... back in the day, I was quite happy to buy in "libraries" of routines. I bought in some database libraries, I bought in libraries for Turbo Pascal, Turbo Pascal for Windows, C and C++ libraries, and many more. And yeah, I know I'm dating my developing days there ..... to computing pre-history.

    But the point was, and it's not quite the point you're making (or not the only point, anyway), that though they could be quite expensive, they were a LOT cheaper than spending the time re-inventing the wheel. So, with the proviso that the libraries were well-written (and by and large, if you were careful and shopped around, they were), it was cost-effective.

    Of course, the logical extension of buying in code libraries is a common "standard" platform. It's the same ideal taken to the next level. As for Silverlight, I'll take your word for it, as I've never used it. I'm more likely to be familiar with dBase code, or the Paradox runtime, or even MS Access runtime module. And if I can find my walking frame, I'll shuffle over to the shelves where I've still got them. Hell, I've still got Netware III (and II, for that matter) on them. I did ditch the Turbo Pascal libraries a year or so back, and I figured I'm not likely to develop for (DOS-based) Turbo Pascal any more. And they were on 5.25" disks. Seriously, they were.

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    Re: News - Windows RT cost cut for vendors is on the cards

    Quote Originally Posted by Nikumba View Post
    Make Outlook work on it would be a start
    It's been confirmed it will be in 8.1 the free update.

    I'm guessing making the outlook protocol work in a battery friendly way has been a struggle!
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