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Nevermind, Microsoft Still Doesn’t Get Mobile

Friday, August 31, 2012 8:42

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(Before It's News)

Windows 8 will come in two flavors: RT and regular. The RT version is optimized for ARM processors, the kind you find in mobile devices. The obvious conclusion was that Windows RT would scrap the desktop entirely, and function exclusively within the UI formerly known as Metro. The big news about this was that Microsoft promised a version of Office 2012 optimized for Windows RT.

This was really exciting news (to us gadget geeks). After all, Apple has a provided some pretty amazing versions of Pages, Numbers, and Keynote for iOS. Except that few people use Page, Numbers, and Keynote for business. So Office 2013 RT, optimized for tablets, was a potentially killer feature.

Instead, we get this:

That’s right, instead of a Windows 8 app, we get the same old, impossible-to-navigate-with-a-finger desktop UI for Office 2013 RT that Microsoft has been trying to get people to adopt for years. It’s not optimized for the tablet UI, it’s just optimized for the tablet processor.

Which means that if you thought the coming Microsoft Surface and its Windows 8 tablet cousins were going to finally provide a full-featured mobile user experience, you were mistaken. This isn’t any closer to a tablet you can get real work done on than the crappy user experiences Microsoft has been pushing for years. Microsoft apparently still thinks we basically want convertible tablet PCs with pen inputs. Buzz killed.