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Early Surface Sales Pitiful
Nerval's Lobster writes "Microsoft has earned $853 million from sales of its Surface tablets, according to the company's annual Form 10-K filed with the SEC. That's a bit of a disaster, to put it bluntly. Earlier estimates put Surface sales at roughly 1.5 million units; the $853 million figure reinforces that projection. By comparison, Apple sold 14.6 million iPads in its last quarter alone. Adding insult to injury, Microsoft spent quite a bit producing and marketing Surface. The Windows division's 'cost of revenue increased $1.8 billion, reflecting a $1.6 billion increase in product costs associated with Surface and Windows 8, including a charge for Surface RT inventory adjustments of approximately $900 million,' read the Form 10-K. 'Sales and marketing expenses increased $1.0 billion or 34 percent, reflecting an $898 million increase in advertising costs associated primarily with Windows 8 and Surface.' Overall, Microsoft's Windows division earned $19.2 billion in its fiscal 2013."
In other words, Microsoft spent more money on advertising the Surface than they took in selling it.
Is the fundamental issue that people are sick of using shitty computers with shitty locked down versions of windows all day at work, so they don't want more of the same bullshit for their personal devices?
SURELY NOT!!!!!
Disaster after disaster. Shut if down and be done with it. Every MS story gets on my nerve. Except lot of noise, they produce nothing worth mentioning.
Go away and stop wasting my time.
All the totally-not-obvious-at-all product placement in Under the Dome is surely going to kick things into high gear!
What, did someone think huge numbers of people would toss their IPads and buy a new Surface instead?
The market was already pretty well penetrated, and there was never any reason to believe that the introduction of a new product would increase demand.
Consumers & business have their share of distate for BSODs and other disasters that cause them to go to other devices.
Is the ipad really the best comparison here? Surface RT seems like a flop, but I think most people purchasing the Surface are doing so as a small form factor laptop. How does it compare to the sales of the Airbook?
I remember a time when Microsoft had a larger vision for surface.
God spoke to me
According to loopinsight.com Apple sold over 50 million iPads in the time it took Microsoft to sell 1.7 million Surface tablets.
Microsoft... There's a name you don't hear every day... They're still around?
Nice try but ask anyone on the street to name the operating system their iPad uses and they won't have a clue. Funny you say "locked down" because Apple seems to have perfected that idea. In reality its because the market is saturated already and most people don't use their tablets for much besides playing games while in the shitter. Your trolling is lame for someone with a low UID.
How big of a fuck up would it take for Ballmer to be forced to resign?
I'd pick one up for 100-150 bucks. Get that sucker open sourced and generate some good will MS. You are not going to do anything else with those.
All those ads with people dancing around snapping covers on and off - opening and closing weren't enough to evangelize the masses as to the virtues of the technology?!?
As much as I hate Microsoft - it's sad to say - that the [very, very] few people who I know who actually had a Surface had nothing but RAVE reviews about them. The summary was: "Size/weight of an iPad - but with a real keyboard. I could take it to meetings, and actually run Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and Outlook. I could actually take notes with the keyboard - and not some "add-on" iPad type keyboard which made the iPad as big and bulky as a small laptop or netbook".
So in short - it was a real "productivity" device - not like tablet, which I still don't think is really good for anything but *light* web browsing and watching movies on a screen, the size of what we used to watch them on in the 70's.
ear surfactant saves pitbull.
which is funny, cause i use a surfactant on my pitbulls ears. and he also lives in a walled garden.
Some day Microsoft will make a really good case study as a company that had the PC world on a string and ended up making themselves irrelevant by trying to copy a model that works and turning it into something that doesn't.
Good leaders run toward problems, bad leaders hide from them.
Remember when the early XBOX sales looks so bad they thought it might drag Microsoft under?
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
I took one look at the intro video and was blown away, I thought that Surface was as cool as dammit. But then I assumed that it would be priced at Microsoft prices. Instead they tried to sell it at Apple prices. Had they, from the get go, offered iPad coolness at a Windows price, I think they might have made a go of it.
I could have told them how this was going to end years ago. We all could. Why it something so blindingly obvious to just about every technically minded individual on the internet out of grasp to a supposedly top tier vendor?
My favorite part is remembering all the shills posting right here on slashdot, copy-pasting the same tripe astroturfed all over the other major forums/boards/social media hotpots. So many fake posts about how surface is the best thing ever, how it's being adopted in droves, how it's the next hot thing.. Pure schadenfreude.
Funny thing is, I actually like the surface Pro. For it's class of device, it's the best there is by long shot and everyone who needs that class of device should buy one.. Trouble is, the thing is being marketed as something else. It's being marketed as a general purpose computer with at touch interface. Which is garbage. It's the same failed convertible tablet platform Microsoft has been trying to push for more than a decade. (This one sheers off the keyboard and includes touch in addition to pen input)
The surface pro actually has a pro grade pen digitizer built right in. It is an amazing artists tool. It sells for less than an equivalent pro device (Digitizer on LCD screen), only it's an entire computer and not just a screen you attatch to another computer. Microsoft accidentally invented the best digital artist's tool to come in a long time, and doesn't even know it.
According to the article, the RT version outsold the Pro version 2-to-1. Yet everyone seems to agree that RT is useless. The RT is most likely selling based on low price point. The Pro version isn't selling at all. Disaster is putting it mildly.
The Surface is a wonderful device that I love to use. My seventeen kids all fight over the privilege to use it and they all want to replace their iPads with a Surface. They're just flying off the shelves, and the local stores can't keep them in stock. I have to drive 200 miles to buy more. At work our productivity increased 1,022% when we replaced all of our ipad and android tablets with the Surface. It's so cute and convenient, I just can't keep my hands off of it.
There, did it for you. Cut and paste as necessary.
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
"Early Surface Sales Pitiful"
Maybe they should go underground. Am I missing something?
Everything I write is lies, read between the lines.
Overall I liked the Surface RT except for 2 major issues: App Store only and extremely limited Cisco VPN support. To elaborate, 3rd party VPN support is almost non-existent. The Surface Pro is better for compatibility, but it costs too much for myself to justify buying one. If Microsoft is going to make a tablet that has productivity they better expand their VPN client capabilities for their ARM based tablet and they better do it fast. Then these things will have more appeal for business sales.
has *anything* positive happened for microsoft since SB took over?
Heh, I remember when the Ipad was first announced. Every single "Technically minded individual on the internet" called it the dumbest thing in the world.
Except they didn't. In fact the transition from iPod to iPhone to iPad was both predicable to those technically minded and desired. In fact most technically minded people where using similar products for years. The only thing that surprised me at the time was the low price for an Apple product (I was less surprised by the iPad mini)
Remember when the early XBOX sales looks so bad they thought it might drag Microsoft under?
Except the early Xbox sales where great. From a 2001 article http://uk.gamespot.com/news/microsoft-reports-strong-xbox-sales-2829778 "Xbox sold out as soon as we launched, and we're selling systems as fast as we can produce them. More than 100,000 units a week are being delivered to retailers, so game players are likely to find Xbox systems throughout the holiday season. With one of the best launch lineups ever, I understand why Xbox is the most sought-after gift for the holiday." "
Not sure why people are trying to rewrite history.
The Surface failure to me entirely comes from their dual marketing of the Pro and RT versions, which we all know was brutally confusing to the public due to the fact the interface was identical but one could run desktop apps and one could not. Most people could care less about ARM vs x86. They see Windows they want to be able to use Windows just like at home/work. Some say that's a reason people would avoid the Surface where to many I think it would have been a plus.
If MS had ditched RT and only released the Pro and sold it at a loss to meet that $500 price point, or a second less expensive version with an Atom/i3 type processor it would have made marketing simpler and more effective and more people i feel would have been on board. The face that RT came first means they blew through all their momentum on something nobody wanted. By the time the Pro came out (which besides the battery life is a great piece of hardware) it was too expensive and nobody cared.
MS tried to win on all fronts and ended up losing both.
Here in Virginia, the engineering schools **REQUIRE** a touch screen Windows computer. Last year I had to pay $1800 for a touch screen Win7 laptop for my son to go to VT for engineering. This year, the students seem to be paying **ONLY** $899 for a Surface as it has keyboard and touch screen. Also, these are **SUPPOSED TO** last for all 4 years of college!
It seems like kids could pay about 1/2 that for a nice laptop, and replace it in a couple of years when it WILL break.
I guess they have not heard about open source, BYOD, Android tablets, Chrome laptops, etc. Oh, wait, how much was that Calculus book last year.... Nevermind.....
You don't go into a runaway market at the same price as the leader.
Microsoft should have significantly undercut the iPad pricing model if they wanted to have any hope with RT. The only useful differentiation that it has over Android and iOS tablets is the ability to run Office and most people with the consumer model tablets don't want to do that.
They really should just have skipped RT altogether. It just confuses the market.
They should have stuck with the Pro only, and marketed the hell out of the fact that you could do real work and run existing apps on it and it has a real keyboard!
Microsoft should have been prepared to lose money on the hardware as a loss leader for a significant amount of time to get share and then make it up with appstore and software sales later.
RT was a disaster from the outset.
She was actually the perfect target audience for a Surface Pro. She wanted something tablet-sized but also a PC, high resolution, touchscreen, optional keyboard, and was willing to pay ultrabook prices for it. The Surface Pro checked off pretty much every box in what she was looking for and she was halfway out the door to buy one.
Then came ifixit's teardown and repairability review. Glue? Are you kidding me? If it breaks outside of warranty, you have a very, very expensive paperweight. They only offer a 1-year warranty, with an optional 3-year extended warranty (which includes accidental damage). And she's been burned by their extended warranty already (they refused to fix a cracked screen because they said since the laptop was out of production, the replacement screen cost exceeded her original purchase price and thus wouldn't be covered).
Jeff Atwood (of CodingHorror, StackOverflow fame) praised the Surface RT:
I can't even remember the last time I was this excited about a computer.
Or you could say that with their first revisions of Surface, Microsoft has already managed to pull 10% of Apple sales. That's not bad for a new product working against an established and rather enthusiastically supported competitor.
Microsoft is a brand that inspires no confidence from consumers, and the only one who actually likes them are simpleton sysadmins.
-- Linux user #369862
I just went to see in on e would make sense to replace my girlfriend's ageing laptop. All she uses is Office and a web browser.
The sponge keyboard is a unbelievabler £99.99 ($151.62 US), the actual keys one is a shocking £109.99 ($166.79 US). www.microsoftstore.com appears to not have any any information at all about what's missing or time limited in the 'preview' of Office RT or how much the non-preview will cost.
No sale.
A pizza of radius z and thickness a has a volume of pi z z a
that explains it.
Last year, I wasn't too aware of microsoft surface and etc but I really wanted one. I looked for one at so many stores before Christmas but I guess it didn't come out until later. I ended up buying another tablet. Their later release date lost at least myself as a potential buyer.
I cannot think of one single Microsoft product, hardware or software, that I've wanted to purchase in the last 15 years, whether as a consumer or head of tech departments with big budgets to spend. Lackluster products, poor user-acceptance testing, poor debugging prior to release, poor security, miserable customer support (on contract or per incident), awful product design, and on and on. The last thing I took momentary note of was Kinect, but I have become so disenchanted with Microsoft across the board that I was sure it would be crap too and dismissed the thought.
About 7-8 years ago a colleague showed me his new install of Vista and I felt so bad for him I unclipped the Ubuntu Live thumbdrive I had on my keychain and gave it to him as a gift. Last month my poor brother-in-law begged me to help him with his brand-new Windows 8 machine, struggling and wheezing under the weight of its operating system, freezing and slowing to a crawl to launch basic apps. I put Ubuntu on as a dual boot and I've never seen a happier human being. He's gaming on Steam now and not casting a single look back at MS.
So when all the marketing hype around the Surface hit, it didn't even cause a ripple on my consciousness. These sales figures confirm it hasn't done so for anyone else, either.
I do wonder how long it's going to take for MS to implode. They have failed to innovate or protect their lock-in for more than a decade now. Users and businesses have moved on with their use patterns. MS's then-and-still cash cow, Office, has been satisfyingly re-created by Google and Open/LibreOffice for many years now, so eventually even stodgy IT Managers (Baby Boomers, I'm looking at you) will get religion.
Do what you can, with what you have, where you are.
I'm waiting for the fire sales. I would buy one if the price is $150; definitely will get it if it is $100.
Microsoft! nobody wants your stupid touch-everything bullshit. Dump your overpriced mobile devices, dump the Metro crap, and release what your customers ACTUALLY WANT! Seriously!
I, for one, would like to see Microsoft combine the Surface tablets with their brilliant server OS strategy. Picture, if you can, a tablet that only runs a PowerShell prompt floating in a sea blue. Yes, friends, you can own the new Surface Core. It's like Windows, only without windows, and in a convenient tablet format!
Windows is going the way of phlogiston...
And they all 100% suck.
Apple locks you in - you do what Apple allows and forces, including some of the crappiest written software ever imagined (iTunes). That also forces you to pollute your desktop PC with more crap (iTunes).
Android & Apple hideous development environments. Seriously, yes they can do anything, so can machine language code written in hex, that is not the point. The point is Apple runs this proprietary disgusting mix of object oriented and non-object oriented legacy crap. Android uses a semi decent language (potentially) but surrounds it with a hideous never considered anything but command line crap they call a UI. It depends on a buggy, poorly designed open source IDE
Microsoft has a decent language, the best UI in existence, and arguably the best IDE, but you cant run anything but Internet explorer, you cant deploy it conveniently to your own machine, and certainly not to anyone else's. It's a 'me too' clone with all the bad parts and none of the good parts.
They let the people worried about money get in the way of making a good product, and the result is failure (serves them right).
Gates made MS at a time when he ignored the bean counters and made Windows despite OS/2, to be better, not more profitable. The profit comes automatically. When you force profit in over being a good product, the surface is what you end up with. R.I.P. MS, the good you will be missed.
slashdot troll = you make a compelling argument I do not like the implications of.
At least with laptops, I can stick Linux on them when their version of windows gets too bogged down with viruses.
Shove the taskbar to the side and stretch it out to 128 pixels wide. You can easily get 40 quick launch icons on the taskbar and you can add a toolbar folder and have launchers for all your favourite docs right there.
Isn't that 1.5 million sitting on shelves in stores, not 1.5 million in people's hands?
The only thing worse than a Democrat is a Republican.
For what it's worth, the Touch Cover is actually stiff enough to use in your lap, never mind the Type Cover (the one with actual keys). The tablet will also happily support itself with its kickstand on my knees. With that said, the angle that the screen is at (determined by the kickstand) is intended for use on a desk and is not optimal on your lap.
I personally think that the second point was their biggest fuck-up. It's dead easy to recompile most desktop software for RT. Microsoft even provides the tools, although the public toolchain needs a little convincing before it will let you use them that way (changing a single line in an XML configuration file). Even the lack of certain features, such as OpenGL, can be worked around; gldirect works for wrapping OpenGL calls as DirectX functions, and is itself portable to RT.
However, you can't *run* those programs, per Microsoft's say-so. Never mind that a "jailbreak" appeared shortly after release. Never mind that it makes the OS tremendously more useful. Microsoft still tries to lock it down, rather than embracing the market for an ARM device. Here's what I would have done: .NET (which doesn't need recompiling to switch from x86 to ARM). Possibly even include legacy .NET versions (RT only comes with .NET 4.x), just to get the maximum app compatibility. Strongly encourage independent software vendors for Windows to publish .NET apps compiled for "AnyCPU" to get maximum compatibility. This should have been done prior to RT's launch, but they could still give it a go now. .NET, or for the owners of legacy codebases, convince them to recompile their software for ARM. Make it really easy; no restrictions in Visual Studio, all the library files included with the SDK (so we don't have to cut them out of system DLLs), as many pre-compiled and built-in libraries as they can convince themselves to supply. Again, this should have been done long ago. .MSI files as "fat installers" where the arch-specific version of the program appropriate to your hardware gets installed. Tiny .NET-based installer programs could pull the correct native binaries over the Internet and install them. Wherever possible, don't make the user choose what architecture to install; just let them go on installing programs the way Windows users always have.
1) First and foremost: no lockdown. Limit it to Microsoft-signed binaries by *default* if they feel it's needed but allow users to unlock that restriction. Hide it somewhere, like a bcdedit option, if they really want to. Similarly, don't lock the bootloader; use SecureBoot, but allow it to be disabled and/or allow other keys to be installed, permitting the use of non-MS operating systems. We already paid for the hardware and software it came with, right?
2) Push the use of
3) For devs who don't use
4) Create and push architecture-independent installers. It should be possible to use
5) Market desktop apps (for RT; they already do this for x86 and x64) through the Windows Store. Make it really easy for users to find the apps they want, and at the same time get people used to using the Store. If they decided to try the lockdown-by-default route, include dire warnings about how desktop apps are inherently less secure than WinRT (Modern / Metro) ones because WinRT apps run in a sandbox, but let people enable the installing of such apps through the store.
6) Get BlueStacks, or somebody like them, to provide an Android compatibility layer for RT. It doesn't have to be amazing, but make it *good enough* that Android apps can be effectively considered to be available (preferably by default, or with minimal effort) on RT. Don't put them front and center, but *do* include it in your feature bullet points ("can run software from the Windows Store, plus Android applications") and "how many apps" lists!
7) Encourage hardware vendors to build and certify RT drivers, then distribute them via Windows Update (as is done o
There's no place I could be, since I've found Serenity...
...Microsoft would make $24+ billion annually with Windows and Office each contributing $1billion a month! Now the whole of the company is only $19 billion annually.
Truth is like the sun. You can shut it out for a time, but it ain't goin' away. - Elvis Presley (source: imdb.com)
It's only a matter of time before Microsoft unloads all of these unsold Surface RT tablets for next to nothing, just like HP and Blackberry did with their failed tablet designs.
Anyone want to take a guess when the remaining Surface RT's will start showing up on liquidation sites like Woot for around $149? I'm thinking that they might make great door-busters for a Black Friday sale... you can finally get that person who's been drooling over your iPad a tablet of their own. Just don't be surprised if they hate you for being a cheap skate.
Hmm, is it just me or is taking 10% of Apple's tablet pie pretty darn good for a new entrant?
Apple went into the MP3 market at the top, into the Phone market at the top and into the tablet market at the top.
If you want to learn business, do NOT take MS as your only example unless you got an IBM willing to hand you a market for free.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
Sure, it could be more but name 3 companies in the world that would not care about $1 Billion!
Okay, The U.S. Government blows that every hour but besides Uncle Ben and his fried rice brain.
Main reason I won't get one is that when (not if) RT dies; all you have left is a paperweight.
At least with laptops, I can stick Linux on them when their version of windows gets too bogged down with viruses.
It's likely possible to make an Android distro or regular Linux for the Surface RT. I have an exploit I've been holding onto that could be used to boot a Linux kernel at startup, even with RT's Secure Boot active.
The hard party of it is making a Linux distro that works on Surface. Having a Windows background, I wouldn't know the first thing about porting Linux to unfamiliar motherboards.
"Screw Sun, cross-platform will never work. Let's move on and steal the Java language." - Visual J++ Product Manager
Slashdot technorati will dump all over this, but the only truly open ecosystem in user-purchasable computing available today is x86 from Intel and AMD. All others esp ARM based platforms (except for -albeit interesting- toys like Raspberry Pi) are vertically integrated closed systems that you have to explicitly defeat the original vendors efforts to keep them closed to use in non-approved ways and in many cases (eg Apple IOS devices) are virtually impossible to reload a different OS on.
This is deliberate and the anomaly of x86 is a result of a series of happy accidents and mistakes several vendors incl IBM made in created a monster they never wanted but have had to live with because it became such an unslayable monster. Let's hope it lives on so that in 2020 we're not all using closed hardware/software bricks that are totally at the mercy of vendors. (We'll just have to join hobbyist cliques of people who like to work on "vintage computers" from the early part of the century...)
And the fact that the processor on the Surface CANNOT run the software that works on Windows 8 PC's. And if you surf around the net you see that Windows 8 uptakes on laptops and desktops isn't happening as quickly as Microsoft wished.
Why on earth someone will buy surface unless he is blakmailed or kidnapped or forced otherwise,
.
Really, why on earth would the price matter? It's still Windows and Office. The average Joe wouldn't mind if his employer would hand these out instead of laptops. But why on earth would he want one? They have a techie at the office that goes around all day long fixing stuff. They don't have or want that at home.
Even more so, The idea of Window and Office as work tools is so ingrained in people minds, that they don't want them in their Smartphones and Tablets. I'd wager a guess that people actually consider the availability of a word processor and a speadsheet in what they want to use for Facebook and games as a serious downside.
I think Caterpillar has a similar problem. Their brand is so strong they're always having trouble selling their non-work shoes. This despite putting the best materials in those shoes industry wide.