Microsoft pulls the plug on its last Windows RT tablet

You can't just completely separate the hardware from the software.

There is no equivalent sister product to the iPad because there is no official tablet running OSX (unless the rumors are true).

If Apple had released the iPad running iOS and, at virtually the same time, had released a tablet running OSX it would have been equally as foolhardy.

Actually I take that back. MS was still more foolhardy. At least iOS was already firmly established and had an app base from the iPhone that it could leverage. Windows RT had nothing.

Remember when Microsoft released RT? No one ever arrived at the same conclusion.

Uh, yeah, I do. Here is an article about the the Surface RT.

["RT users can't install any of this older software. None of it. Desktop mode is entirely worthless in RT, a cruel tease of non-functionality. It'll only remind you of how much you can't do with your Surface, and is going to confuse the living hell out of most people who buy one—especially when Surface Pro, built on x86 architecture and perfectly compatible with all of those legacy programs, steps in a few months from now.

<snip>

Should you buy it? No. <snip> That could change. <snip> Maybe the quasi-vaporware Surface Pro, which eschews Windows RT in favor of the real-deal Win 8, will make all the difference, opening itself up to the open seas of PC software (for several hundred dollars more)."](http://gizmodo.com/5953866/microsoft-surface-rt-review-this-is-technological-heartbreak)

That article is even from slightly after RT was release and before the Pro was released.

Pure anecdote here but at the same time that article came out my brother was chomping at the bit to get a Surface Pro and scoffing the Surface RT because it couldn't run normal Windows apps as he had been for months.

RT was going to have a rough ride. But it was dead before it even began when MS decided to release a competing sister product (i.e. another tablet running a full version of Windows 8).

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