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."

Comments

Marketing expenses

[bonch]

In other words, Microsoft spent more money on advertising the Surface than they took in selling it.

Re:Marketing expenses

[recoiledsnake]

How so? The advertising figures include Windows 8, not just the Surface.

Re:Marketing expenses

[jd2112]

Hollywood accounting?

It would be Hollywood accounting if they had sold 20 million units in the last quarter but still managed to loose billions of dollars.

Re:Marketing expenses

[AlphaWolf_HK]

Another thing to consider is that revenue isn't profit. Revenue doesn't include, for example, the cost of the tablet itself that was sold in each transaction, but rather how much they sold the tablet for.

I imagine that after R&D and physical hardware costs, they're probably operating at a pretty deep loss on Surface. I'm curious if that is both Surface Pro and RT or just the RT though.

Re:Marketing expenses

[Jason Earl]

Yes, and how is that working for them? At this point it is hard to tell whether Surface of Windows 8 was the bigger fiasco.

Re:Marketing expenses

[fahrbot-bot]

In other words, Microsoft spent more money on advertising the Surface than they took in selling it.

I'm sure all those commercials showing people dancing (or finger painting) with their tablets were way more expensive to produce than ones showing people doing actual work -- if that's even possible -- on the tablets would have been. To be fair, I think the Surface/Windows8 commercials are entertaining and well done, but they don't inspire me to actually want/buy the products.

Re:Marketing expenses

[Anonymous Coward]

I hate it when the dollars get loose

Re:Marketing expenses

[adamstew]

The revenue is for any device bearing the "Surface" name. It includes all models of Surface RT and Surface Pro.

Re:Marketing expenses

[Shirley Marquez]

Large marketing expenses for the launch of a major new product are normal business. The problem is not that Microsoft spent the money; it's that they spent the money on a product that people didn't want. Surface RT delivered too little for too high a price; by the time the product came to market its 720p+ display and dual-core CPU were inadequate for its $500 price point, and there was little app support. If Microsoft had been serious about entering this market it should have been priced at $299 at launch, and quickly followed by a Surface RT+ with quad core and 1080p display as an upsell product. The build quality of Surface RT is outstanding - the VaporMG shell looks good, it feels very solid in the hand, and the engineering of the magnetic snap-on covers is slick - but that just wasn't enough to get people to pay a premium price for it.

Surface RT was probably doomed from the start in any case. The inherent problem is that developers don't want a third platform to exist and succeed; that means 50% extra effort for every product they develop. The developer's ideal world would have a single platform, but they grudgingly accept the need for two to limit the monopoly power of the platform owner.

Surface Pro and its successors will see some success among people who want to use their desktop software in a portable form factor. Full Windows devices will always cost more, weigh more, and have less battery life than devices using an OS purely designed for mobile, so they are likely to remain a niche market that will never achieve iPad-like sales numbers. But there is money to be made there, since the devices will sell at higher price points than the more mass-market tablets.

sick of windows at work

[SkunkPussy]

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?

Re:sick of windows at work

[bonch]

People have invested in iOS and Android apps, leaving little incentive to switch. Additionally, WinRT lacks functionality compared to Win32. Microsoft has become reactive and conservative, following what others do rather than leading. They had the opportunity years ago to shake things up with the Courier tablet, which was focused on content creation. The project was killed because Bill Gates wanted it to be a more traditional device that interfaced with Office.

Re:sick of windows at work

[Kenja]

The walled garden has yet to reach the Apple desktop, which is still a POSIX compliant UNIX environment complete with X-Window (as an optional install) and BASH that can run off the shelf commercial software. It is in fact the last such platform on the market.

Re:sick of windows at work

[Anonymous Coward]

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?

No, the problem is an inexplicable tablet interface on the new desktop OS and a tablet which seemed to be sold on the idea that it does absolutely everything that the laptop which you already have does in exactly the same way, not to mention it running that bizarre new interface people keep muttering about because it's apparently terrible.

Re:sick of windows at work

[Penguinisto]

Yes and No.

Joe Sixpack** doesn't give a damn about the lock-in per se (see also the iPad). They want something that has flexibility, durability and (apparent) speed packed into an easy-for-them-to-grok mobile interface. A pretty UI/graphics package is also a must. Note that the iPad does all of that - it doesn't come with an instruction manual, yet most non-techie folks can pick it up for the first time and do what they consider to be useful stuff with it in less than five minutes.

Surface RT OTOH? Pure fail in this department.

** sample size = one spouse, all my relatives, and a handful of non-tech friends. Your own mileage may vary.

Re:sick of windows at work

[Kenja]

Well their vision is "the same interface on all devices". The problem is, we as consumers dont want that. A phone interface does not work well on a desktop. That, and it's ugly.

Re:sick of windows at work

[mwvdlee]

The fundamental issue is that people already have a choice of multiple shitty locked down tablets, for which they can get far more applications for just about the same price or less.

What reason does anybody have to buy a SurfaceRT?

Re:sick of windows at work

[slim]

OSX isn't the competitor to Surface though.

Re:sick of windows at work

[h4rr4r]

The last such platform?
So no other UNIXes still exist?
There are other POSIX compliant desktops available on the market not made by Apple?

Re:sick of windows at work

[MickyTheIdiot]

I think he was talking platforms with marketing departments.

Re:sick of windows at work

[sjames]

In Microsoft's vision of the world, an electric drill would need a gas pedal, a gear selector, a brake, an ignition key, and a steering wheel because consistent interfaces are important (who cares if you can actually use it?).

Re:sick of windows at work

[jedidiah]

> The walled garden has yet to reach the Apple desktop, which is still a POSIX compliant UNIX

MacOS is a proprietary GUI based user environment with it's own history, culture, and expectations quite different and distinct from Unix.

Only a vanishingly small minority of MacOS users care or even know that their shiny happy thing is a Unix underneath.

Apple is as much a Unix vendor as Tivo is.

Re:sick of windows at work

[jedidiah]

The level of attachment to either leading mobile platform is highly disputable. The apps for both platforms tend to be dirt cheap or just plain free. The average Apple or Android user probably has less invested in there platform in terms of "apps" than the cost of a single PC game.

The real vendor lock is going to come from platform only entertainment content like music or books or movies.

Re:sick of windows at work

[Aaden42]

On a related note: 'Wonder why Apple doesn't try a tablet with OS X for a bit more than an iPad?

Because Apple figured out that touch & mouse based devices need a different UI paradigm to be useful.

If you want ultra-portable OSX, you get an Air. If you want a touch screen, you get an iThing, in your choice of three sizes (four if you count pre-iPhone 5 sized devices).

Re:sick of windows at work

[mblase]

OSX isn't competing with Surface, per se, and OSX may be a POSIX compliant system, but why does Apple do things like make Safari non-compliant with regard to standards like the W3? One web site I worked on had the worst rendering with Safari. I mean, almost useless W3 non-comliance. We had to develop a plug-in to deal with some of our stuff. Firefox, IE? No issues. We could use the stock browser components.

What website would that be? I prefer to do my testing in WebKit browsers, personally.

Re:sick of windows at work

[Penguinisto]

You need to update your propaganda. Apple no longer has the lead in tablet market share.

Has nothing to do with propaganda, or even who has the lead. However, it has everything to do with why the Surface RT failed utterly. The UI is confusing and ugly, and the flexibility (read: app support) is simply not there. Battery life is a big question mark, and half the internal storage ("disk") space on the low-end model is eaten by stuff that the consumer sees no use for (the recovery partition, the bloated-as-hell OS, etc.)

Replace "iPad" with "Android" if it makes your phallus turgid - machts nichts, my point still stands. Th3e RT sucks because it fails to meet the requirements I outlined up there.

If you can prove me wrong, please do so.

Re: sick of windows at work

[peragrin]

Windows 8 may have the same interface on all devices the problem windows RT is simpler

Windows RT is windows that can not run Windows Programs.

It was doomed to fail for that reason. Apple might be swapping parts of the UI back and forth across devices for consistency. But apple never said IOS was OS XI

Re:sick of windows at work

[PPH]

The problem with ignoring experts or deriding them is that sooner or later the rube consumer is going to depend on experts.

But the experts have been bought or discounted. The MCSEs have a vested interest in propagating Windows. Its defects are their job security. The others have been discredited as Apple or Linux fanbois. Besides, people become emotionally invested in their choices. Once they have been led down a bad path, they are less likely to listen to alternatives than when they made their original choice.

Sometimes all you can do (as that expert) is to walk away. Even Dr. House has to call the time of death on occasion.

Re:sick of windows at work

[MrEdofCourse]

I agree, I'm wondering too what site he's using as a comparison. Wasn't Safari the first, or one of the first to pass Acid3? And I know the Acid3 test isn't without criticism but Safari was scoring 100/100 when IE was scoring 20/100.

I pretty much build in Safari, check in Chrome and Firefox, which will always work and then allocate twice as much time as all of that took to make it work with all the versions of IE I need to test for.

Re:sick of windows at work

[readingaccount]

What reason does anybody have to buy a SurfaceRT?

The Surface RT is one of the few tablets which can run Microsoft Office (not the web version - an actual native application). Office is not available on the iPad or Android Tablets, and since the RT is cheaper than the Surface Pro and any other competing Windows 8 tablets, that makes it the cheapest tablet available to run Microsoft Office.

Some people LIVE in Microsoft Office to the point where they don't need anything but it and a browser to do their work, which is where the RT would be useful I suppose. Unfortunately, the marketing doesn't seem to hammer this fact for some reason. I would have thought it would have been a rather useful thing to point out in commercials, but maybe I was wrong.

Note that I don't have a Surface and don't give a shit about Office because I code on FPGAs for a living. If I had to I could use LibreOffice easily enough (though I don't because Office 2010 is so damn nice to use). But I do at least understand what the RT was going for - it's just that no-one seems to know.

Wasn't that expected?

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:Wasn't that expected?

[unimacs]

Microsoft's view was that the iPad and similar Android tablets were fine for media consumption but were really lacking when it came to creating. Having a physical keyboard without adding significant weight or bulk was a killer feature in their mind.

A lot of people felt that Microsoft did an excellent job in designing the keyboard. A key point they missed though is that once you stick a keyboard on a tablet like that there's not much distinction between it and a small laptop. So why not just get a laptop?

One of the nice things about a tablet is that you don't need an flat surface available in order to use it. Microsoft's own Surface commercials show a bunch of people sitting around a table. A tablet that requires a desk in order to take advantage of one its key features isn't going to set the world on fire.

Microsoft went in the wrong direction

[GoodNewsJimDotCom]

I remember a time when Microsoft had a larger vision for surface.

Re:Microsoft went in the wrong direction

[Anonymous Coward]

The problem with the Surface RT was that it was best described by what it couldn't do.

"It's like iPad, but it doesn't run apps from the Apple store."
"It's like a Windows PC, but it doesn't run all Windows software."
"It's like a laptop, but you can't type on it in your lap.

Microsoft completely fucked up the marketing. If Surface RT came out three years ago, it would have dominated, but Apple and Android have already shaped user expectations. They created a device that runs a browser and MS Office...enough to cover 99% of computing use...and it has twice the battery life, half the weight, and a third of the cost of an comparable ultraportable laptop. It should have been a killer piece of gear, and the engineers probably thought they created something really special. Too bad Microsoft thought it would just sell itself in market where existing tablets had already gone the content-comsumption only route.

Re:Microsoft went in the wrong direction

[jd2112]

The problem with the Surface RT was that it was best described by what it couldn't do.

"It's like iPad, but it doesn't run apps from the Apple store." "It's like a Windows PC, but it doesn't run all Windows software." "It's like a laptop, but you can't type on it in your lap.

Microsoft completely fucked up the marketing. If Surface RT came out three years ago, it would have dominated, but Apple and Android have already shaped user expectations. They created a device that runs a browser and MS Office...enough to cover 99% of computing use...and it has twice the battery life, half the weight, and a third of the cost of an comparable ultraportable laptop. It should have been a killer piece of gear, and the engineers probably thought they created something really special. Too bad Microsoft thought it would just sell itself in market where existing tablets had already gone the content-comsumption only route.

I avoided the Surface because I'm not coordinated enough to do the dance moves they show on the TV commercials.

Surface vs iPad

[moonwatcher2001]

According to loopinsight.com Apple sold over 50 million iPads in the time it took Microsoft to sell 1.7 million Surface tablets.

Microsoft...

[khr]

Microsoft... There's a name you don't hear every day... They're still around?

Re:Microsoft...

[Tarlus]

Yeah, it has been a couple hours since the last article about RT's failure. Slashdot was about due to post another one.

Failed Marketing

[bradgoodman]

Really?!??!

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.

Re:Failed Marketing

[bbcisdabomb]

Really?!??! 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.

This is exactly what I love about my Surface. I take it to a meeting, drop open the cover, and tap the Word button. Boom, I'm ready to go, then save everything to Skydrive so I can look it up from anywhere. The people with iPads (everyone else, tbh) tend to have to fiddle with the bluetooth settings and figure out where Pages saves stuff. My Surface just sort of works. YMMV, IMO, and all those other fun acronyms apply.

Re:Failed Marketing

[gl4ss]

well that explains it then.

if ms's employees work consists of stuff they can do on surface rt, then they're fubar - office and metro apps.

unfortunately it's only better content creation as well if you don't have kb with the ipad and if you do they're about the same.

Beats the crap out of XBOX sales

[Overzeetop]

Remember when the early XBOX sales looks so bad they thought it might drag Microsoft under?

Re:Beats the crap out of XBOX sales

[idobi]

Historically, the Xbox division is still not profitable. It's net -$3B from 2001

Re:Beats the crap out of XBOX sales

[rahvin112]

They will never ever make money on the XBOX, by the time they start making money on the console it's time to replace the console with a newer version, and that's after they dragged the refresh cycle out 3 years longer than the previous cycles.

If I was a shareholder I would be livid, that money could have been put into share purchases or dividends for far more return to the owners.

Re:Beats the crap out of XBOX sales

[nine-times]

Yeah, I remember that. It was almost as funny as when they had so many recalls that they had to spend absurd amounts of money to replace most of the XBox user-base's hardware. Or when they released the Kin phone and it failed miserably? Hilarious.

It's fun remembering Microsoft's failures. And it's impressive that Microsoft still squeezes enough money out of Windows and Office to keep paying for these failures.

I admit it, I was taken in by the early hype

[Presto Vivace]

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.

Re:MS Suffering from Legacy Effects

[CastrTroy]

I haven't had a BSOD in years. The only time I reboot my machine is for updates. Windows used to be unstable, but more recently I find it rock solid. I wonder if all the problems I had in the past with Windows was due to cheap/faulty hardware and bad drivers, and had nothing to do with the OS itself. I don't think I've ever seen any of my Windows 7/8 machines crash at all (certain applications will crash but not the OS). Windows 8, which many people complain about is actually quite nice, if you can just get yourself past the UI. It's a little bit jarring to have that start screen show up, but really I haven't noticed it at all. I just treat it like a really big start menu in Windows 7. Hit start, type name of program, and run it. It's really easy to start commonly run programs because the target is so big. I no longer have to have precise aim like I did with the quicklaunch bar, and I don't have to have screen real estate taken up by the quicklaunch icons (which I generally have about 15-20 of).

RT more than Pro?

[guytoronto]

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.

Re:RT more than Pro?

[CohibaVancouver]

The Pro version isn't selling at all.

It's a pity, because I've got a Pro and it's a pretty kickass machine. I agree the RT doesn't make sense, but the Pro is well thought out.

The Surface is Wonderful!

[roc97007]

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.

Re:The Surface is Wonderful!

[JamesA]

Practicing for an Amazon Vine review?

Re:MS Suffering from Legacy Effects

[oGMo]

Well hooray for you, but I have to reboot win8 (game machine) constantly. Apparently, it has a well-known bug where it sends a reset command to the hard drive under certain conditions. This can cause the drive to go away until you power-cycle the machine (even the bios doesn't see it). It's not a BSOD: everything just stops working and you lose anything you were doing, because the drive it was running off is now gone. (It also blows away UEFI stuff, but fortunately you can get it booting grub again from the windows side.)

Happens extremely randomly on two entirely different systems with three different drives. Lots of reports. No fix.

History Rewrote

[tuppe666]

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)

No the Surface simply has crap sales.

[tuppe666]

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.

Re:MS Suffering from Legacy Effects

[CastrTroy]

If you have 15-20 icons on your quicklaunch bar, they have to spread most of the way across the screen, taking up valuable space from the task bar. I personally don't like to group my taskbar items, because I find it actually makes it harder to find stuff. So my task/quicklaunch bar gets really crowded, really fast. With no quicklaunch icons, I have a lot more room for the stuff in my task bar.

My sister was not

[Solandri]

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).

One mans treasure is another mans' trash

[JamesA]

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.

It's a shitty brand

[JonJ]

Microsoft is a brand that inspires no confidence from consumers, and the only one who actually likes them are simpleton sysadmins.

Re:LOL you think so?

[cayenne8]

If you're in the bathroom long enough to even need reading materials, something is very wrong.

Seriously?

From my experiences, and talking with friends, we ALL pretty much refer to the toilet as "the Library"...we all catch up on our reading while sitting on the can.

I figured it was just a guy thing, since most women I know have no clue why myself and my other male friends keep an assortment of reading material in the bathroom.

Don't get me wrong, it isn't being irregular or constipated, just that it does take more than 30 seconds to sit and shit...so, might as well catch up on reading while in there. And for so many of my married friends, it is a good opportunity for a little me time from the wife, as that that is the one place and time they won't try to follow them around.

:)

Re:Is the ipad the best comparison?

[Guspaz]

The Mac Air and the Surface Pro are similar in cost ($999 for the 128GB model of each, but the Pro has a 64GB model for $899). It's hard to break down the Mac Air sales, because Apple doesn't always break mac sales down, but Apple typically sells about 4 million macs per quarter, and the Mac Air is probably the largest portion of that since it's the entry-level portable. I found some figures from previous years indicating quarterly Air sales in the 1.x million range, but I can't find anything more recent. NDP also said this month that the Mac Air has a 56% marketshare in the US thin-and-light laptop category, but I couldn't find any overall sales figures to back that up either.

How Apple is priced compared to the competition really depends on market segment. In some segments they cost a great deal more, in others they don't. The iPad tends to go for a premium over the comparable competitors, but the MacAir tends to cost the same as the competition.

fix this!

[slashmydots]

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 have had them all

[Spiked_Three]

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.

Easy - just unlock the bootloader.

[ron_ivi]

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.

Sidebars are for you

[hippo]

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.

Re:LOL you think so?

[noh8rz10]

From my experiences, and talking with friends, we ALL pretty much refer to the toilet as "the Library"...we all catch up on our reading while sitting on the can.

I refer to it as "my most personal sphere."

Linux and Android are possible

[Myria]

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.