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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."
Illegal, no?
well, dumping what you have is not illegal.
the 900 mil writeoff may well be taking it into account that they would get rid of the stock at price of 150... or whatever.
however here is the point..
"(Despite that sales spike, HP decided to kill the TouchPad; the margins on $99 obviously didn't work out to everyone's satisfaction.)" who the fuck cares if it flies off the shelf for a very limited amount of time? stupid article is stupid and even knows it. make a buttload of loss on every device and make up for it in scale of your inventory..
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
in the hands of resellers who will promptly put them on eBay and Craigslist for $199-$250
isn't that what happened with the majority of the TouchPads that went for $99?
I like microcars
No matter what the materials and other costs per unit, $900M still means a large number of units. There's ways they could use that stock to help keep up their fight for real estate in minds and hearts of users who still consider Microsoft and Windows and Office to be relevant, many of whom probably think the iPad was made by the "Windows people" since they've never seen anything by anyone else. Just imagine if they made a deal to start giving these away with Time-warner or Verizon service. As many home users consider the device and the network to be one thing anyway, they could gain a lot of mindshare that would be lost simply by doing so. Even $200 or more in rental fees from users adding a $10 line item to their bill for it would drop that $900M almost by an order of magnitude. App store purchases would increase overnight, and the remainder of the loss would disappear within a year. There's a lot of creative ways Microsoft could come out of this smelling roses, without "dumping" the stock, and end up better off. Just looking at the numbers you can tell they might be down, but they're not out.
Emacs: for people who just never know when to
In the 90s, Windows and MS Office adoption was driven by de-facto discount/piracy (You could buy a cheap upgrade version to legalize your pirated version). It worked. Office and Windows became the standard.
It's probably the only way a technically inferior product can ever get traction.
Please do not read this sig. Thank you.
So not only would they take a loss on selling the devices at well below cost, but they have ongoing support/warranty costs. Fulfilling an order has some non-zero cost, so that also has to be deducted from the price of the device as well. They could try selling them without warranty or with a very simple 30 day exchange warranty for defective products, but that could leave them with a PR problem when people run into problems with no way to resolve them and the blogs start filling up with complaints about how Microsoft sucks because they won't stand behind their products.
I really wouldn't be surprised if selling the device for $50 costs MS more than destroying the devices.
MS didn't use the same signing key as they used for the Linux loaders... so the verification always fails.
Now if you find a way to hack the UEFI secure boot loader....
Either Microsoft have done security right for the first time in their very long history of bad security, or it's hackable. I'm guessing the last option is more likely.
Some Linux varient on that hardware might be pretty nice.
I'm pretty sure he means dump into landfil and walk away.
Now, as to if that ever actually happened, I couldn't say.
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
The more they sell, the more money they lose.
When you (i.e. Microsoft) have already bought large quantities of a product that are sitting in your warehouse, that's called a "sunk cost". There is no way to "save" that money you've already spent; the only question is how best to use the warehoused inventory to make new income. In terms of business strategy, you actually pretty much ignore sunk costs when deciding what to do next.
Sorry to self-reply, but in case it isn't obvious from the previous post: Microsoft could "fix" RT with a single, simple update. Reboot the tablet and the restrictions are gone.
An official x86 compat layer would be a fair bit of work, of course, but it's not really necessary to do that; the simple ability to run .NET apps (and maybe they get a few of their more important partners to flip the Platform option in Visual Studio to "ARM" and hit Build again; often it really is that simple) would make RT a lot more appealing.
There's no place I could be, since I've found Serenity...
Steve and company are looking to get the "iPad halo". They priced at $499 for that very reason: pricing themselves above the iPad would lead everyone to say "why not just get an iPad?". Pricing below the iPad would be a de facto admission that the iPad is "worth more". Microsoft is trying to establish themselves as having a premium product.
This is why you will never see a Surface fire sale: It is an admission that the only reason to buy a Surface in the first place is because it's significantly cheaper than any other first party tablet (and most third party tablets that don't come in boxes with Chinese bullet points).
HP did the fire sale because they were looking to shuffle their inventory, and it was cheaper for them to sell them at a price well below manufacturing cost than it was to landfill them, and they did so because they were looking to get out of the tablet market anyway - they didn't care what it did to the Touchpad brand because the brand itself was headed for the dumpster out back.
Microsoft still wants to sell tablets. Microsoft wants to sell tablets to people who have $500 saved up for an iPad. The logic goes that if they have $500 for an iPad, they have $500 for a Surface. If they sell at $300, well then it's easier to upsell them the keyboard case and still get close to the $500. At $99, even with a keyboard, a copy of Office RT, and a service plan, they're still leaving about half the money on the table, and in doing so, reinforcing the mindset that "A Surface is only worth 1/5 of what an iPad is worth". Sure, it will get Surface units in the home, that will be used for Internet Explorer and Netflix and...basically nothing else. This is great for the customer because it doesn't tap too much into the money they had saved up for the iPad...but they'll never get a Surface2 at $499, "because Surface tablets just aren't worth that much money, otherwise Microsoft wouldn't have sold first gen units for $99", the logic goes.
Microsoft could probably make $901 million by selling those tablets for ($901 million / quantity in inventory) and do better fiscally with the first gen units than by just taking the writeoff. The problem is that the marketing division knows that premium brands never dilute their influence by committing acts of desperation. Microsoft doesn't want to simply gets units in hands, they want units in hands that have already parted with enough money to mirror the margins that Apple makes on their hardware. So long as this is the case, you'll never see a fire sale.
can't recommend it. I have a friend who's looking for a tablet, I can pick up an RT for him for $199. Won't do it, because at some point he's going to want to install some Windows app on it and he'll be pissed at me when he can't. Apple did a good job of marketing the iPad as a fat phone rather than a thin laptop, people get it. MS can't pull that off because nobody has or wants Windows phones, so they don't "get" what the RT is supposed to be. And making two devices called "Surface" that run different OS's isn't helping, nice going geniuses.
Never let a lack of data get in the way of a good rant.
This is the inside of a 2600 cart.
There is no window.
EEPROM didnt exist yet.
To reprogram an ET cart, they would have had to desolder the PROM, and put a new on on. that might actually have saved money, since they could recycle the PCB that way.
Just lowering the price of SurfaceRT seems uncreative. A better plan would be to give it away for free with a two year subscription to something like a "Microsoft Premium Services Plan" with a monthly fee of say $29 that would include a stuff like: extra SkyDrive storage, a Skype local calling plan, an upgraded subscription to Office 365, and whatever else they can think of. Microsoft could turn a profit over time the way cell phone carriers do when they essentially give away smart phones, and the subscription would drive users to their online properties. All consumer hardware margins approach zero over time anyway so just skip to the end game and focus on selling services.
That will only dignify ARM Restricted Boot. There's no reason to let Microsoft (or Apple and friends) allow some architectures to be useful and others to be outright sealed to their hardware; this will just embolden them to make all PCs jailbreak-required. Best to just not purchase RT, and wait for a real ARM alternative.
Also, Ubuntu. So there's 2 reasons I can't support. Sorry.
You can hold down the "B" button for continuous firing.
In Windows 8.1, Microsoft actually made significant changes just to lock down Windows RT more strongly. They created a new type of "protected process" that protects csrss.exe from debugging, which is exactly how the RT 8.0 jailbreak worked. They clearly spent a lot of engineering resources to do this.
I have a thread post here describing some of the changes in 8.1 that were clearly designed to target RT's jailbreak, for they have little other practical use.
"Screw Sun, cross-platform will never work. Let's move on and steal the Java language." - Visual J++ Product Manager