Mike Abary, the head of Samsung’s PC and tablet business in the U.S., has made it known that Samsung has no plans on releasing a Windows RT device in the United States due to Windows RT not having a strong enough demand nor do consumers know exactly what Windows RT consists of.
Samsung believes it would have to invest in a lot of training to show consumers how Windows RT is beneficial for them. On top of that, Samsung believes Windows RT should be cheaper than Windows 8, but the company does not want to make the trade-offs (limiting memory in the Windows RT devices to bring the price down). “We didn’t necessarily attain the price point that we hoped to attain. It’s not an issue on Microsoft’s side. It’s more an issue of how the product was built and some of the tradeoffs we had to incorporate in it,” Samsung explains. Here is what Abary stated in an interview with CNET:
There wasn’t really a very clear positioning of what Windows RT meant in the marketplace, what it stood for relative to Windows 8, that was being done in an effective manner to the consumer. When we did some tests and studies on how we could go to market with a Windows RT device, we determined there was a lot of heavy lifting we still needed to do to educate the customer on what Windows RT was. And that heavy lifting was going to require pretty heavy investment. When we added those two things up, the investments necessary to educate the consumer on the difference between RT and Windows 8, plus the modest feedback that we got regarding how successful could this be at retail from our retail partners, we decided maybe we ought to wait.
Further reading: Samsung, Windows RT
