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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."
Microsoft had already tried and failed to sell tablet computing for about a decade before Apple showed them how to do it right. Their response was to double down with yet another attempt to shoehorn windows into a role it never fit.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
It was actually surprising - not in the good sense, though. It was surprising that MS decided to enter a cutthroat market that is dominated by dirt cheap hardware made in China and an excellent free OS (Android) or a nearly free OS (Apple.) It was surprising that it chose to compete against MILLIONS of applications written for those two OSes. It was surprising that it decided to release a tablet that carries the name "Windows" [RT] but doesn't run Windows software. It was surprising that MS expected to actually win some place under the Sun in this market.
But of course why would they get any share of the market if they haven't delivered anything new, anything unique that would be worth of jumping the safe and sound ship of iOS/Android? What is it that lures the customer toward WinRT? I do not know, and I'm somewhat aware of what's happening with computing devices. As far as I know, there is nothing new in WinRT, except the fact that it is devoid of applications (compared to the competition.) What they have, is rumored to be largely garbage. I can't check those rumors because I don't know anyone who'd have WinRT. Everyone these days runs with iOS or Android, and they are happy campers.
MS is a million pound giant who is attempting to walk on thin ice. But whatever they do, they cannot get enough traction (=profit) to sustain their humongous empire, where one LOC of change costs a million dollars, after everything is said and done and all the uninvolved parties are paid. They cannot survive on low calorie food. They grew their business on products that they were the sole supplier, and they dictated their prices - hundreds, sometimes thousands of dollars for a copy of software that is sold in millions. This tablet market does not have such a profit margin. MS wants for their OS more than the whole competitor's tablet costs! And if they charge less then they are shipping money with every unit sold.
a) Give away inventory for free at schools etc
b) Bury/dispose of inventory, user base purchases competitors products instead
I know which option I'd be going with.
We are talking about Surface RT tablets. Not Surface Pros. A long time IT pro should recognize the difference.
There really is something wrong with Windows RT. It's a Windows 8 look-alike, called Windows, but it can't actually run Windows apps. We understand that x86 Windows apps can't work on ARM, but Joe Consumer doesn't. They should have called it something other than Windows, but instead they muddled their product-line by trying to ride on the Windows brand. If they called their ARM tablet OS "Surface" instead of Windows, they could have avoided a lot of confusion.
Actually Pac-Man was a miracle of programming and should be seen as such. Look up the history of the 2600, it was designed in 1975-1976 and its main function was built around 2 squares and a sprite, aka Pong and games based on Pong. Pac-Man was released in 1980, more than 4 years in a time when progress was making incredible leaps and bounds every year and on top of that its running on custom hardware, again FOUR YEARS ahead of the 2600.
The fact that they were not only able to get a rough approximation of that game to run on that hardware, but to keep most of the core gameplay intact? It was a fucking miracle and the guy who wrote it frankly ought to be in a programmer hall of fame. Everybody talks about the ghost flickers but do you know WHY the ghosts flickered? because the hardware wasn't even capable of drawing more than one ghost and the character on screen at the same time so the guy drew straight to the screen during refreshes to get more than one ghost on the screen!
Imagine getting a bottom of the line Intel Atom netbook to run a 4 player Borderlands 2 session at full speed and even THAT isn't as hard as what this guy did because at least the Atom did have SOME graphics focus during design, by comparison the 2600 was already cut down from its already not cutting edge hardware to save costs! Hell the thing didn't even have a frame buffer, so give the man some credit, he got a game running cutting edge hardware to work on a system LONG past its prime and not even designed to run that type of game at all, the equivalent of getting Doom II to run on a 1980s Nintendo game watch.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.