Slashdot Mirror
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.
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.
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?
"Also we're at the verge of a netbook-caliber tablet crash where everyone realizes they all suck and stop buying them."
Nope not going to happen, and there is a VERY good reason. Netbooks sucked SPECIFICALLY for everything you listed, tablets dont specifically because they dont pretend to be a full computer. People who buy them know this isnt a computer replacement for real work, but a supplement. Netbooks were trying to bill themselves as a computer replacement but they are really just a POS.
That being said 99.9% of what most people use a computer for is easily handled by tablets. I do my email, surf the web, work on music, type papers and reports, and play some pretty good games on mine, all activities I did at home with my laptop but no longer need my laptop for. In fact since getting a iPad I literally ONLY use my laptop for work, and even there if in a pinch could SSH into my servers and work on them through command line if need be but would prefer my laptop over doing that.
So no, that crash isnt going to happen and anyone thinking it will is smoking some pretty good crack
"Slashdot, where telling the truth is overrated but lying is insightful."
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".
Funny, aside from your incorrect assessment about webpage rendering (at least on the tablets I have tried), I don't want any of those things on a tablet. That's why I have a laptop.
When I'm taking transit (plane or bus) or sitting on the couch and I don't want to pull out my laptop, I don't see any problem with these genre of devices at all.
Apparently you're not the target market and that is just fine.
I think you're looking at this through the lens of being focused on doing 'meaningful' work -- the vast majority of people using tablets are using them for passive entertainment and the like.
I type a few emails on my tablet, not extensive word processing, spreadsheets, or writing code. I watch digital copies of movies that I get when I buy the Blu Ray. I don't care about 99% of the software ever written. I've never had to spend money on stuff, I just don't bother. I easily get my 10 hours of battery life as advertised. And I've never found myself needing either a USB flash drive or to print from it. These just aren't things I do with that device -- I have access to lots of other computers for that stuff.
It's a device I'm more likely to use from an easy chair, the sofa, a lawn chair, an airplane, or occasionally even a hammock. It's entertainment, with some decent connectivity for when I'm on the road. it's en eBook reader, a video game, and can get me some useful information if I can get to wifi, which is pretty easy. And, I can use Google Voice to call the wife instead of paying hotel rates for long distance. It also gets used for those quick google searches in the living room you'd otherwise not bother getting up to do.
I would argue that you can basically say smart phones are essentially useless for all of the identical reasons you list (and I'd be just as wrong as you), and I bet you have a smart phone. They have all of the same limitations you cite, and yet people have smart phones everywhere you look. I refuse to pay the data plan for a smart phone, so a tablet with wifi is a better fit for me. A smart phone and a tablet are essentially the same thing with a slightly different size.
There is no universal way to decide the utility of a device, and different people do different things. It may be true that a tablet doesn't cover your needs, but you need to understand that your needs are probably not typical.
I've had a tablet for about 2.5 years now, and I get a lot of use out of it. I don't use it to do my job or any serious work, but for all of those other little things, it's a convenient device with a more suitable form factor.
The vast majority of people when using computers much of the time are NOT doing 'meaningful' work -- they're surfing the web, watching You Tube videos, sending a few emails, and playing games.
Seriously, stop making categorical statements as if they were facts instead of just your opinion .. because I can say quite firmly that for me, my tablet doesn't suck, and was money well spent on a device I actually use. Just as I'm sure you can equally say that, for you, it's not a device you'd find a good fit for your needs. Neither is anything other than a subjective evaluation.
I've taken my iPad on about 12 trips by now, and about 8-10 of those I also had my laptop. My laptop sits in the bag in case I need access to something, and has been used exactly once while on the road over the last two years. But my iPad sees 2-4 hours/day of use when I travel.
So, maybe you need to recognize the fact that for many of the people who have bought tablets, it is a better fit than a netbook or a full laptop would be.
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
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
I agree. Tablets fit with the changed computer behaviour.
Computers and laptops are made for a desk and for work. But when I come home from work, i don't want to work anymore. I want to use my computer as entertainment (facebook, newssites, youtube, ...). Also, I don't want to sit at a desk but comfortably on a couch.
My laptop/netbook is not ergonomic to use on the couch, and my phone is too small. So i use a tablet.
Tablets are here to stay. And they will become the remote (or hub or whatever) for your tv.
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
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.