Windows RT? More like Windows WTF

Microsoft is taking nearly a billion-dollar loss on its latest experiment in hardware futility, otherwise known as the Surface Tablet and Windows RT. Quick show of hands from Cringeville: Is anyone surprised?

Yeah, I didn’t think so.

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RT was probably doomed from birth. Yes, maybe Intel was too slothlike in churning out power-efficient mobile processors, and maybe ARM chips were Microsoft’s least worst option if it wanted to get some skin in the tablet game before it was game over. Still, a Windows OS that can’t run 99 percent of the Windows software currently on the market is not what you’d call an intuitively great idea.

Personally, I think the biggest problem with Windows RT is the name. They should have called it Windows WTF. As in, WTF were they thinking?

ReTurn to sender

I’ve spent the last week playing with a Windows RT machine, the Dell XPS 10 with the optional keyboard. It’s been kicking around Chez Cringe for a while, and I’ve been mulling whether to take it with me on my now annual jaunt to IFA Berlin (aka Pilsner-and-Sausage-Palooza), Europe’s answer to CES. As much as I like my iPad, I can’t get any real work done with it. I’d heard RT machines offer killer battery life, and I’m looking at 9-hour cross-Atlantic flight.

Ironically, it was at last year’s IFA where I first saw machines running Windows RT. At the time they looked pretty promising. A device that could run Office apps and combine the strengths of both a small laptop and a tablet PC was certainly intriguing.

Did I say promising? I meant exasperating. Here are three reasons.

1. The thing is slow. Not Windows Desktop slow, mind you, but nowhere near as responsive as an iPad. I got plenty tired of watching that stupid dotted circle go round and round as I waited for apps to load. And the tagline “Windows RT: Now 27 percent less annoying than other forms of Windows” lacks a certain marketing appeal.

I am told by those in the know that Windows 8.1, whenever it gets here, will be much faster and fix a lot of RT’s problems. Then again, we’ve heard the “x.1 release will fix everything” line with just about everything Microsoft has ever produced. After 35 years, it gets old.

2. Add the keyboard/extra battery, and the thing gets heavy. It’s no longer a lightweight tablet with a keyboard, it’s 4-pound netbook with a touchscreen. Unfortunately, the physical and onscreen keyboards were in a constant struggle for dominance. Depending on the app and where I tapped, the dueling keyboards would sometimes not allow me to enter anything at all.

3. Worst of all — and stop me if you’ve heard this before — are the Windows 8 apps. Though Microsoft boasts of more than 100,000 apps in the Windows 8 Store, “crapps” is a better word for them. The ones I tried were largely abysmal and/or crippled.

The final straw was when I launched the Dropbox app, opened a document, edited it inside Word, and tried to save it back to the Dropbox cloud. I was shocked to discover there was no way to do that. When I went to the Windows 8 help site and searched on “How do I save files to Dropbox?” this was the first result:

If you store Office documents on Dropbox, then you should switch to SkyDrive instead.

My response to that cannot be published in a family-friendly website like the one you are now reading.

I actually have a SkyDrive account (it came with my Windows Phone). I use it occasionally to share documents with other people I know who have SkyDrive accounts. It is, in my opinion, far less seamless than Dropbox, so I don’t use it very often. I am deeply disinclined to move all of my documents to SkyDrive, just because Microsoft would only allow an intentionally hobbled cloud app into its store.

ReTire it now

That’s it for me. I’m done with RT. I’m going to take my old Vizio Ultrabook-wannabe to Berlin instead, despite its wonky keyboard and 2.7-hour battery life.

In just about every way, using Windows RT was harder than using a normal laptop, let alone an iPad. I had to learn a new nomenclature (“charms”?) and figure out exactly what would happen when I swiped from right to left, or left to right, or up and down, in every single app. As my old pal Steve Bass might say, who needs this tsuris?

If this tablet truly made my mobile working life an unending series of pretty pink ponies wrapped in rainbows, I might be willing to switch my cloud app allegiance and learn a new way of working. But Windows RT doesn’t make things better or easier — it just makes them different.

Here’s the thing about Apple: You can hate its arrogance (I do). You can chafe at its iWay-or-the-highway attitude toward the closed Apple ecosystem (I do). You can rail against the lack of useful mobile productivity apps (ditto). But the iPad makes things simpler. It has its flaws, but being overly complicated is not one of them.

Apple’s greatest strength has been that it puts consumers first. Microsoft, on the other hand, almost always puts Microsoft first. That’s the real reason why RT is such a disaster.

Does Microsoft have a future in the tablet business? Post your pro and con arguments below, or email me: cringe@infoworld.com.

This article, “Windows RT? More like Windows WTF,” was originally published at InfoWorld.com. Follow the crazy twists and turns of the tech industry with Robert X. Cringely’s Notes from the Field blog, and subscribe to Cringely’s Notes from the Underground newsletter.