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Microsoft Is Sitting On Six Million Unsold Surface Tablets
DavidGilbert99 writes "Microsoft took everyone by surprise last year with the Surface tablet. It was something completely new from the company everyone knew as a software company. However nine months later and the sheen has worn off the Surface tablet and Microsoft's financial results on Thursday revealed it has taken a $900 million write down on the Surface RT tablets, leading David Gilbert in IBTimes to estimate it is sitting on a stockpile of six million unsold tablets."
I do not think that has been possible because of the UEFI. http://news.softpedia.com/news/Linux-on-a-Microsoft-Surface-Tablet-Is-Nearly-Impossible-318152.shtml
no comment
Thats why the poster said "Release the secure boot key..."
Just saying it like it are.
"nearly free" = "hidden from the uncurious customer." Apple customers pay for the whole experience - from rounded corners to the hardware to the OS to the online services.
Actually, Microsoft was on phones long before Apple. It was called PocketPC in 2000. Switched to Windows Mobile in 2003. Then Windows Phone in 2010. They had around 40% market share in 2007. Which is when the iPhone came out. I had WinMo phones back in the day. That was the phone to get if you wanted apps, the ability to run a cellular data WiFi router, etc.
The iPhone was Apple's response to MS, RIM, and Palm. Not the other way around. And their response crushed the competition.
I played a bit with a Surface (we have a good relationship with MSR, so lots of people with them are floating around the place) and it seems like a pretty nice device. The problem is not that it's bad, it's that it doesn't really have any compelling advantages. There are several things it seemed to do a bit more cleanly than iOS or Android, but nothing that it did a lot better, and if you want to write code for it you're limited to quite a restrictive environment (which probably doesn't matter to non-geeks, but it will have a knock-on effect on the availability of software).
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
So true. I remember my 1st M$ phone. It was crap: crashed multiple times during a day, and the battery life was absolutely terrible (and this was with a stock/no-apps install). It would actually restart in the middle of phone calls!
Been an iPhone user since day one - best decision ever.
The Surface RTs failure hasn't cost $900m because it's a bad operating system with next to no apps, or because it's overpriced compared to the iPad, or because other manufacturers wouldn't touch it with a bargepole, those are just multi-million dollar mistakes. The billion dollar mistake was keeping on making more and more and more of them when public are not buying.
Apple famously throws it's weight around with suppliers to cut down on unsold inventory. It famously keeps just 5 days supply of products in stock. They save on warehouse space, they can roll out new products at short notice, and if the world stops buying something, they are not sitting on an unsold mountain of it. Why is this simple, non propitiatory method of not getting stuck with unsold inventory the one thing that Microsoft steadfastly refuse to copy from them?
A pizza of radius z and thickness a has a volume of pi z z a
in contrast to iPads which are premium and expensive.
Sadly, many school districts are spending taxpayers' money on large stacks of iPads too.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
It wasn't always that way - Apple used to be left with thousands of stale Macs that nobody wanted to buy when they would release a new model. They would end up writing them off. And, in those days, they were suffering from model schizophrenia where you would have 14 different models of the same computer where the only difference between the model numbers was the store they were bought from, or a slightly different load of crapware preloaded.
Then Tim Cook came in and streamlined the logistics chain into the machine that Apple is today. This is the primary reason he was tapped to be CEO.
Slashdot still doesnâ(TM)t support Unicode after it was added to the HTML standard in 1997.
Depending on year, New Mexico car license plates show "New Mexico USA." I guess the New Mexico powers-that-be want folks to know the state is part of the USA.
In a time of universal deceit, telling the truth is a revolutionary act. George Orwell