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Surface Pro Sold Out; Was It Just Understocked?
TechCrunch is one of the many outlets to report that Microsoft's Surface Pro tablet computer sold out on its first day of wide availability. Business Insider points to Reddit threads complaining that "selling out" was largely a product of not having all that many in stock to begin with, in some cases not even enough to cover pre-ordered devices.
I think the Surface is a terrible device, but It will be interesting to see reaction to this vs reaction to the Nexus ordering issues.
a standard marketing technique? That makes it possible to be "Amazed and pleased at the huge demand that has far exceeded our expectations!"
Warning: this article may contain humor, sarcasm, parody, and perhaps even irony. Read at your own risk.
Microsoft also "sold out" of the Surface RT on launch day as well... and that thing has sold poorly after it's initial launch. They were originally expecting to sell 2 million units in Q4 2012, and they only sold about half of that.
It seems that this tactic has become a common way for Microsoft to generate some additional post launch hype for their products. I wonder how many times they can get away with it before the mainstream press catches on...
The question is whether or not it's a marketing strategy. Was someone at Microsoft wise enough to say "Hey, Apple and Nintendo made headlines by limiting supply..."?
There's no -1 for "I don't get it."
I would absolutely buy one if I had not recently bought a high-end notebook. In fact I am thinking about buying it anyways and selling the notebook.
Why?
All the reviews I've seen say it's a heavy, expensive, power-hungry tablet that makes a crappy, expensive laptop.
The battery life is the biggest draw back in my opinion. Not a deal breaker, but still a drawback.
For practical use in business, you have to be able to have it run all day on the shop floor, the sales floor, the offices or the patient wards.
To be fair, the run time tests were continuous operation of some fairly screen intensive applications. If it is allowed to go to sleep mode in between frequent, but not continuous use, it may be fine in the real world.
Sig Battery depleted. Reverting to safe mode.
>Maybe they just know roughly how many they expect to sell, and stock accordingly?
That just means that Microsoft doesn't believe in its own product.
If you really believe that your product will sell and people will stand in line for it, like they stood in line for Windows 95, and you've got the cash, you should at least make enough to fill the pre-orders and a couple of month's retail orders. It's not like Microsoft is hurting for cash for manufacturing and it's not like they don't have millions to throw at marketing research to find out the actual demand. There are so many things wrong with this "shortage" it doesn't pass the sniff test.
>Really, why?
Schadenfreude is fun. If you step on the backs of people with your boots on the way up, expect kicks on the way down. They deserve all the derision they get.
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BMO
Some things sell out because they just can't make enough. The company has made as many as it can and put them all out to retail, and they all sell. However other things sell out because the company deliberately limits production/distribution to make them scarce.
I can work too. People seem to have an irrational need to own things if they are told they can't have it. So paradoxically it can work to increase sales in the long run. People are told "you can't have this" and that makes them want it, even though they didn't before.
Look at the massive run on firearms/magazines what with the proposal for new gun legislation. These people were perfectly happy with what they had prior to this, but suddenly they get told "you can't have this" and they want to rush out and buy it.
This is tangential to your overall point; but Amazon's strategy seems to be not no advertising; but rather advertising a new way to buy Amazon stuff to existing Amazon customers. You see some chatter about the e-ink models(though less now, since they aren't trying to sell an entire product category to the non-techies); but the tablets are largely invisible unless you go to amazon.com, at which point you'll see references to the things all over the place.
Given the reports about Amazon's negligible margins on the hardware, and their aggressive re-skinning and integration with their own store of stock Android, it seems likely that they mostly care about taking existing Amazon customers and turning them into better Amazon customers, while the other players are more interested in moving units across the board.
Shit, son. Apple didn't even SHIP any iPad Minis to any stores in a 30 mile radius from me, save two that I'm aware of -- one being an Apple store, and the other an Apple-store-inside-a-Walmart.
Most places didn't start seeing them until right around Christmas (erring more towards *after* Christmas than before).
And of course Apple dropped iPad 3 prices by 50 bucks, and then again, so they now match the iPad 2 prices. Which were *not* dropped. So that the iPad Mini would be their lowest price point, so as to drive its sales. Many places stopped getting iPad 3 shipments around the last price drop, but PLENTY of iPad 2s! Which NO ONE WANTS, but Apple was able to unload onto retailers and keep the profitable 3s for their own stores.
Not that any of that doesn't make good business sense..
but then, not that any of that isn't at LEAST as big of a douche move as what you're saying MS is doing here.
... still waiting for this free-as-in-beer free beer I keep hearing about.