DisARMed: Microsoft kills Windows RT, future ARM support doubtful

One of the most striking reversals over the past three years has beenMicrosoft’s embrace and subsequent backpedal from the ARM ecosystem. In 2012, when Microsoft first demonstrated Windows on ARM (later named Windows RT), the technology world was in broad agreement that this bold move to support a non-x86 architecture would be a vital component of future Windows devices. Today, it looks like that support is dead or at least on life support. At its Windows 10 event earlier this week, Microsoft confirmed that there will be no Windows 10 for current users of Windows RT. Windows RT users will instead receive some unspecified “feature” updates.

This doesn’t mean that Microsoft is abandoning the ARM ecosystem altogether. The company is making major efforts to unify the Windows environment across all devices, including phones, which means that ARM products will still be supported on these devices. It does suggest, however, that traditional desktop support for ARM is going away, and that future ARM hardware will be confined to a subset of the Windows market.

Windows RT: Maligned and mismanaged

The non-adoption of Windows RT was a perfect storm of poor decisions at multiple levels of Microsoft. The Tegra 3 SoC that powered the first generation Surface RT didn’t pack enough horsepower to really drive a top-tier tablet experience. Microsoft did a miserable job communicating the differences between Windows RT and traditional x86 Windows, tales spun of consumers taking the hardware home, firing it up, and then returning it when they realized they couldn’t run desktop applications.

In retrospect, Microsoft’s decision to retain the desktop for Windows RT was a huge mistake. While it’s true that the desktop offered certain functions that the nascent Metro design wasn’t ready to replace on launch day, the sight of familiar icons and desktop interfaces primed consumers to expect the same degree of software compatibility and flexibility. Stripped of those features, Windows RT lost much of its appeal.

The Microsoft Store — the new interface that was supposed to drive purchases and usher in a new era of profitability for Microsoft — was a half-functional wreck. Users who expected to be able to tweak the GPU settings on their Nvidia hardware were disappointed, Surface RT offers no equivalent to the Nvidia Control Panel.

The entire assumption of Windows RT, the reason it existed is because Microsoft bet that Intel would be unable to deliver a CPU that could compete with ARM devices in the lower end of the tablet market. The initial launch price on x86 tablets reflected this assumption — Microsoft plus Intel would rule the high end of the tablet market, while ARM-based Windows 8 products would take over the lower end. Unfortunately, it quickly became clear that the ARM products in question were going to completely fail to uphold their end of the equation thanks to a crippling lack of software and a bad overall experience. Meanwhile,Intel kept iterating, eventually delivering tablet and smartphone processors that could match their ARM counterparts in ways that previous generations of hardware couldn’t accomplish.

It’s been clear for several years that Microsoft had no idea how to fix RT. Microsoft updated the hardware once, in the Surface 2, but it never really revisited the bad set of assumptions that handicapped the device. It would’ve made little sense to ship an x86 emulator on the original Surface RT, but a hypothetical third-generation RT device (if one existed) would likely be based on Nvidia’s Tegra K1 or an equivalent 64-bit chip from Samsung or Qualcomm. Devices like these would’ve been powerful enough to run x86 software, even if they didn’t run it particularly quickly, and could’ve eventually bridged the software gap. Instead, Microsoft is going to focus on its Windows Phone devices and grow its ARM support in that product line.