Chop, chop: Windows RT to go as Microsoft exec says company has too many operating systems

Windows executive Julie Larson-Green admits: 'We don't need three operating systems'

Microsoft's version of Windows for ARM-based devices, Windows RT, is being lined up for the chop, after Microsoft executive Julie Larson-Green admitted that three different versions of the Windows operating system was one too many.

Windows RT has received a frosty reception since it debuted on the Surface RT tablet computer in October last year. Intended to run on ARM-based tablet computers and other devices, it is incompatible with applications that run on standard versions of Windows.

Larson-Green, executive vice-president of Devices and Studios at Microsoft - effectively in charge of the look and feel of Windows - told a seminar run by investment bank UBS: "We have the Windows Phone OS. We have Windows RT and we have full Windows. We're not going to have three."

Windows RT, she said, was Microsoft's "first go" at creating the kind of closed environment popularised by Apple with the iPhone and iPad. However, Microsoft had been heavily criticised for copying Apple and making its own Windows Store the only way of downloading apps to devices running RT.

Instead, Microsoft will probably unify ARM-based Windows RT into ARM-based Windows Phone 8 to create an operating system that can run across low-power, touch-based devices - like Android and Apple iOS.

Independent analyst Richard Windsor forecast in March 2013 that Microsoft would discontinue Windows RT "sooner rather than later", although the company persisted with new Surface 2 devices released in October 2013.

More recently, he told The Guardian: "Windows RT is an orphan child that sits between Windows 8 and Windows Phone and is neither fish nor fowl. Hence the devices that are based on it are underpowered with hideously limited functionality on the desktop making them inferior to both Android and iOS tablets."