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Microsoft Surface Struggles to Ship A Million Units
zacharye writes "While some see potential in Microsoft's Surface tablet, most industry watchers appear to have written off the device at this point. Orders were reportedly cut in half following a slow launch, and Microsoft's debut slate has been hammered time and time again by reviewers and analysts. The latest to pile on is Boston-based brokerage firm Detwiler Fenton, which estimates that when all is said and done, Microsoft will have sold fewer than 1 million Surface tablets in the slate's debut quarter."
Still better than 25,000.
With the surface pro's battery life at an estimated 4 hours. We can expect that to fail as well.
I think the actual biggest reason for this is people who wanted a tablet already got a different product from Samsung or Motorola or Apple and they're not going to spend all that money again just to switch. MS came into the game WAY too late.
Also we're at the verge of a netbook-caliber tablet crash where everyone realizes they all suck and stop buying them. They're too fragile, they don't have a DVD drive, they're harder to type on, the screen is tiny, they get dirty with fingerprints, they don't run 99% of software ever written, everything they do on it is designed to cost money, the browsers don't display pages correctly, the battery life is a lie, most don't have USB flash drive capabilities, they don't work with the majority of printers, and it's difficult to do meaningful work on them in any way shape or form. That's actually slightly more cons than netbooks and they went from boom to flop in approximately 2 years.
Sounds like the a tiny, caseless computer for hackers and wannabe hackers designed mostly by volunteers is going to outsell a flagship product from one of the most powerful companies in the world.
Microsoft has no clue what users actually want, film at 11.
When is Microsoft going to learn to make a truly consumer-oriented device other than the XBox? Not with support for Office (that takes up most of your space apparently), not with support for Outlook, but to do the things people are using other tablets for.
Every time they release a product, the marketing is so heavily geared to Office/Outlook/Exchange I have to wonder if Microsoft is aware of the fact that loads of people use computers for things that don't involve their business applications.
If your marketing is focused on how I can do spreadsheets and connect to my corporate Exchange server, then you have no idea of what it is I'd be looking to use this kind of device for. Because I don't want either of those features.
It just always seems Microsoft is so focused on their business tools, that the result is too much focus on that. And it always seems like they launch a product after someone else has been successful with it, and then miss some of the attributes of the other product which make it successful in the first place.
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
As much as I'd love to bash on Microsoft for a while, I must say that there seems to be some FUD floating around here. You have reviewers generally praising the hardware and the OS while at the same time advising readers to stay away because of the struggling App ecosystem. Good luck attracting developers that way.
Seems to me that MS could drop the price to make it a loss-leader and watch them fly off the the shelves, if they wanted.
"Here Lies Philip J. Fry, named for his uncle, to carry on his spirit"
Most Honest reviews of the surface are actually pretty positive. I think the main problem is that it's $650 by the time you add the touch cover. And most of the reviews say you need the Type cover to get a really good experience, which is even more expensive. For the price you can get a decent ultrabook that runs all your old windows programs, and is about the same size. Only thing missing is touch, which although nice, isn't a must-have feature. Most people are probably awaiting the Surface Pro, if they are thinking of buying a surface at all, because then you can run all your old Windows Software. If you can't run your old software, you could just get an iPad or a Nexus 7/10.
Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.
The fact that after so many years of backwards-compatible Windows versions they launched their first tablet device with a desktop environment that wouldn't run anything other than Office was a huge "wtf" to me. So now in the first few months of it's life Microsoft have polluted the Surface brand as the little tablet that couldn't. I thought the Pro might still stand a chance in the face of this until I read the 64Gb edition would cost $900 and have a 4hr battery life. Ultrabooks, despite being slightly larger, seem to be much more capable for the same price. I don't know what Microsoft was thinking. They p'd off their hardware partners to launch this?
Then you're not paying attention. Most of the reviews I've seen say the OS is fine and Metro/Modern works okay for a tablet, it can be frustrating to use without a touchscreen on a desktop. So while Win 8 will probably work on older hardware, it might be best to wait to get it when consumers can get hardware with touch.
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
You can get a Nobel Peace prize for "not being George W Bush", but apparently people aren't standing in line to buy "not an iPad".
Who cares?
The only review that matters in the end is what the market thinks. The market doesn't seem to be buying. Saying "the professional reviewers liked it!" is loser talk.
-- "So they told me that using the download page to download something was not something they anticipated." - Bill Gates
for a site with highly libertarian users who are all about personal privacy and internet freedom, it's weird how often you see slashdotters ripping on anonymous users *only* because they're posting anonymously.
- ac, lol
You act like people gravitate toward superior products, as opposed to the product with superior marketing.
You seem to think there is a differentiation between the two. If an inferior product reaches critical market mass through superior marketing, that mass often makes it the superior choice.
Betamax was superior to VHS, but the players were multiples of cost and the content was lacking. Although Betamax was superior for the engineer, VHS was superior for the consumer.
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Any offense taken to this post is at your sole discretion.
I doubt they do it, for a few reasons:
* They're allegedly "all in" with the thing. They know that the Surface Pro (the one which can run 'actual' windows programs) won't sell much more than any other Windows tablet has since 2001, so if they're going to do tablets, the RT is pretty much it.
* They went out of their way to totally screw up the UI in Windows 8 just to accommodate tablets. They risked enterprise acceptance, long-time customer expectations, and more... just for tablets. This reinforces the first point, but also means that if they fail, it'll be a damned hard time explaining why they would eventually put the UI back (not marketing mind, but Ballmer's own political reasons, since he and the recently-departed Sinofsky put so much of their reputations into the damned thing.)
* They didn't sell the remaining Kin or Zune units at fire-sale prices, did they? (I'm honestly not 100% certain, but I believe they did not).
Finally, HP did it because they really weren't all that invested in the things - that is, HP didn't bet the company on a tablet paradigm. Microsoft however appears to be doing just that.
Quo usque tandem abutere, Nimbus, patientia nostra?
Microsoft dealt netbooks the death blow with their "reference platform" for Windows Starter Edition. You couldn't have more than 2GB of memory with only 1GB installed and still get the super duper netbook discount for Windows. You couldn't have a screen larger than 10.2". Only single core CPUs were allowed. This stagnated the netbook market at the same time when full sized laptop prices were dropping and hardware was improving while people shifted away from desktops.
Why would anyone buy a crippled netbook for $250-$300 over a cheap laptop with a real version of Windows, optical drive, multicore processor for $300 - $350? The weight and battery life weren't worth the drawbacks for $50. I was shopping for a netbook for my daughter to take to school during this time and opted to get a laptop instead.
Microsoft disrupted the natural market with their license demands in an attempt to kill Linux on netbooks. Unfortunately for them, the iPad shifted the market for low power computing out of their sphere of influence.
You have obviously not used Windows lately, or any other Microsoft product if you say such abjectly ignorant things. You may laugh, but those of us who have to support Microsoft products know the truth, and how wrong you are. Microsoft-level quality products are indeed expensive, and for good reason too, do you have any idea how much it costs to support this crap? How hard it is to keep up and running? Clean it up after the latest security breach? Preventing breaches is a fools errand, give it up.
All this costs money, lots and lots of money. Initial purchase price may be low compared to everything but FOSS, but that is only the beginning. If you calculate TCO, you will see exactly how expensive this poorly coded pile of outdated security holes really is. It ain't cheap.
-Charlie
[Yes, this may look like sarcasm, but sadly it is not]
That's not the party line, citizen.
Actually; it seems to be pretty much the party line. Every time we get any discussion of the various Windows 8 components someone pipes up and says "have you tried it", "if you saw the real thing" etc. etc. Every analyst house has completely overestimated the success of Windows phone 7 and Windows 8 in every way. In the same time when Tommi Ahonen was able to give accurate Windows Phone market share forecasts. Have a look at a almost any review; They say "it's great but the price is too high"
Look at the difference between an Android tablet priced for $300 and an Android for $600. One of them is a great value device with real compromises to bring it down to price and the other is a really great no questions device. You can't write a review which says "it's great but it's only worth half it's price". What you mean is "it's crap for the price and they should cut the price to a level where it's worth the money". The entire media is running scared of naming the pile of garbage that is Surface. Have a look at how carefully they never criticize the low resolution of surface; They always prefix with some Microsoft marketing statement; for example extreme tech writes:
etc. etc.
Try to find one of the mainstream reviews which mentions that the surfaces resolution, at 148 PPI, is worse than almost any modern tablet. As a point of reference; the iPad has 264 PPI, the Nexus 7 has 216 PPI and the iPad mini has 163 PPI. The Google Nexus 10 with a 300 PPI screen is a completely different league. With a screen like that the correct price for a Surface is in fact around $250. You would have to go back to the very original iPad screen to find an Apple product with a lower resolution screen. The same thing repeats with mention of the terrible user interface experience - always gently skipped over or we are told "you can get used to it fast". Again with the app store, almost every review completely ignores the quality of the apps ported from iOS.
Have a look on any site with "consumer reviews". You will probably find more positive reviews than there are people outside Microsoft with tablets, and any review which reads as if someone actually used the product will be voted down out of visibility.
I think that the great thing is that consumers have finally realised that there is a Microsoft party line; have realised that that line is everywhere and that they are choosing to ignore it.
=~ s,(.*),<sarcasm>$1</sarcasm>,g if any_point_you_wish();
Someone was complaining the other day about some of us pointing out the very obvious Microsoft shills, but there is quite obviously a very concerted effort by Microsoft to pump up their credibility and to diminish that of their competitors. It would be quite entertaining if someone were to expose it as they did with the FaceBook attempts.