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A Radical Plan For Saving Microsoft's Surface RT
Nerval's Lobster writes "Last week, Microsoft announced that it would take a $900 million write-off on its Surface RT tablets. Although launched with high hopes in the fall of 2012, the sleek devices—which run Windows RT, a version of Windows 8 designed for hardware powered by the mobile-friendly ARM architecture—have suffered from middling sales and fading buzz. But if Microsoft decides to continue with Surface, there's one surefire way to restart its (metaphorical) heart: make it the ultimate bargain. The company's already halfway there, having knocked $150 off the sticker price, but that's not enough. Imagine Microsoft pricing the Surface at a mere pittance, say $50 or $75 — even in this era of cheaper tablets, the devices would fly off the shelves so fast, the sales rate would make the iPad look like the Zune. There's a historical precedent for such a maneuver. In 2011, Hewlett-Packard decided to terminate its TouchPad tablet after a few weeks of poor sales. In a bid to clear its inventory, the company dropped the TouchPad's starting price to $99, which sent people rushing into stores in a way they hadn't when the device was priced at $499. Demand for the suddenly ultra-cheap tablet reached the point that HP needed weeks to fulfill backorders. (Despite that sales spike, HP decided to kill the TouchPad; the margins on $99 obviously didn't work out to everyone's satisfaction.) In the wake of Microsoft announcing that it would take that $900 million write-down on Surface RT, reports surfaced that the company could have as many as six million units sitting around, gathering dust. Whether that figure is accurate—it seems more based on back-of-napkin calculations than anything else—it's almost certainly the case that Microsoft has a lot of unsold Surface RTs in a bunch of warehouses all around the world. Why not clear them out by knocking a couple hundred dollars off the price? It's not as if they're going anywhere, anyway."
Dumping generally refers to a foreign company
'In economics, "dumping" is a kind of predatory pricing, especially in the context of international trade.'
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dumping_(pricing_policy)
Good-bye
HP's approach was monumentally stupid. WebOS was a really nice system (I still prefer the UI on my TouchPad to my TransformerPad Infinity StupidName), but it lacked developers. They were giving them away to developers at the end (which is how I got mine), but then they killed the platform so there was no incentive to write a single line of code for it. I ported Objective-C to work on it, but then gave up on the platform when it became clear that the TouchPad was the last device ever to use it.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
Excuse me... pay attention.
Windows RT. No UEFI key available to the user. No alternative boot. No way to even develop your own non-Metro application.
It renders the Surface RT table a glorified rock... unless you happen to want to run software from Microsof't's app store. Even then... $100 may be overpriced.
SecureBoot is no big deal, at least I haven't had too many problems with it. I'm running Linux right now on a 13" Pro Retina, and UEFI wasn't too much of an issue.
Apple laptops don't use secure boot. EFI does not imply secure boot.