Microsoft Makes Another "Nearly Sold Out" Claim For the Surface Line

Microsoft made some confident sounding claims about sales of its first-generation Surface tablets before it became clear that the tablets weren't actually selling very well. So make what you will of the company's claim that the second version is "close to selling out." As the linked article points out, the company has "fallen short of offering any real explanation as to just how “close” to selling out the Surface 2 and Pro 2 really are – nor have they indicated how many were on hand to order in the first place."

Comments

Who cares about?

[faragon]

Metro interfece is nice, but useless without software.

Re:Who cares about?

[AliasMarlowe]

Metro interfece is nice, but useless without software.

Microsoft interfeces? Sounds like shitty interfaces to me!

Re:Who cares about?

[girlintraining]

Microsoft interfeces? Sounds like shitty interfaces to me!

They are still bitter that they had the idea for a tablet long before Apple, but when they announced it, it was to a big yawn. When Apple did it, everyone pissed themselves like excited dogs, and then when Microsoft tried again... everyone said they stole the idea from Apple. Microsoft usually can see the train coming long before it arrives. For some reason though, they rarely manage to get on the train. Execution and follow-through has always been a problem for the organization; Especially now that the CEO is a dancing monkey-man who knows the price of everything but the value of nothing.

Kind of sad, really. Apple continues to gain marketshare and is making more money with it's 1 out of 8 people using Apple products than Microsoft is with 7 out of 8 using their OS. How incompetent do you have to be to lose when you've got 8 times the marketshare? :\

Re:Who cares about?

[ColdWetDog]

Microsoft usually can see the train coming long before it arrives.

Microsoft's train of thought is still boarding at the station.

Re:Who cares about?

[lennier1]

It's actually the best description I've seen in a long time.

Re: Who cares about?

[Anonymous Coward]

Microsoft made gigantic errors and, as per usual, failed to follow the progress and trends of mobile computing technology. There's no real reason why they didn't however incompetence at all senior levels was the true cause for Microsoft's lack of innovation and competition.

Re:Who cares about?

[rjstanford]

They are still bitter that they had the idea for a tablet long before Apple, but when they announced it, it was to a big yawn.

Having the idea is, sadly, the easy part (and Microsoft was far from the first - check out Sun's future doodles from a few decades ago). Its getting all the pesky details right and having a solid combination of hardware, software, and demand that's tricky. That's what Apple is far better at than the current Microsoft.

Re:Who cares about?

[girlintraining]

Microsoft's train of thought is still boarding at the station.

I'm not sure their thinking process qualifies as a train. I'd say that looks more like the rail equivalent of the short bus.

Re:Who cares about?

[Capt.Albatross]

Microsoft usually can see the train coming long before it arrives.

In my reading of its history, Microsoft has spent a good deal of its existence catching up with one train or another. Two notable examples: GUIs and the internet.

Re:Who cares about?

[mysidia]

check out Sun's future doodles from a few decades ago

Where can you find these?

Re:Who cares about?

[Anonymous Coward]

They are still bitter that they had the idea for a tablet long before Apple

Citation needed. They had the idea for a tablet long before 1987? There were several tablets in development around that same period, some of which made it to market, yet none of them were from Microsoft. Microsoft began working on their first tablet in 1999.

Re:Who cares about?

[interval1066]

How far can this train metaphore express itself?

Re: Who cares about?

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm not sure, but the end of the line must be coming soon.

Re:Who cares about?

[mysidia]

They are still bitter that they had the idea for a tablet long before Apple, but when they announced it, it was to a big yawn.

ATT ran a series of advertisements in the early 1990s. In which they featured a pen-based computer "sending a fax from the beach" and a computer in a car giving turn-by-turn directions.

Before the advent of modern cellular technology, wireless data, and GPS.

Apple started working on the Newton in the 1980s, and the product was released 1998-ish. Years before Microsoft had the idea of the Tablet PC in ~2000.

There were a number of simplistic tablet-like devices and PDAs that came out in the 80s, as well, from various other manufacturers, such as the "Pencept", the so called "Pen computing" fad; the GRIDpad, the Momenta pentop, NCR 3125 Pen computer, HP OmniGo 100, DEC Lectrice, Palm Pilot.

Re:Who cares about?

[RMingin]

You know, I keep hearing this, but MS's vision for tablet computing was very, very different. I actually owned several examples of MS's tablet PCs, and then owned a first gen iPad. I now have a Nexus 10, in case anyone wondered.

The Tablet PC (TPC) was big, heavy, had horrible battery life, and almost always was a convertible laptop as well. They pictured the laptop becoming a portrait orientated clipboard lookalike, with the full processing power, heat, noise, etc of the laptops of the day.

Apple launched the iPad and it was thinner, lighter, cooler-running and longer-lasting than any major laptop of the time. Laptops were just starting to hit the 5 pound mark and still be usable, iPad was around 1 pound. laptops were still pushing 15-16" displays very hard, the iPad was right around 9 inches diagonal. Laptops were generally between 1 and 2 hours run time, the iPad did anywhere from 8 hours on up, depending on how you had power management set up.

Sure, the broadest strokes of your statement are true. Microsoft announced tablet PCs years before Apple and everyone yawned. However, it wasn't (only) because it was from Microsoft. It was because the idea was premature, and the MS version we were sold sucked rather hard.

Re:Who cares about?

[Anonymous Coward]

>> Microsoft usually can see the train coming long before it arrives.

This is true and I was one of the early users of their phone products (ref xda-developers), spending a few thousand dollars on the products out of appreciation. However, when we were refused updates and cooking bios access, many quit and refused to return.

To pioneer you need to support those that appreciate your vision.

Re:Who cares about?

[mysidia]

The Tablet PC (TPC) was big, heavy, had horrible battery life, and almost always was a convertible laptop as well. They pictured the laptop becoming a portrait orientated clipboard lookalike, with the full processing power, heat, noise, etc of the laptops of the day.

That's what the technology was capable of the time --- you needed the CPU power, to run the applications, therefore you needed all the thermal management that comes along with it.

Apple's tablet came at a later time, when CPUs had greatly improved --- the ARM chips were available, Intel had Atom; you could make really thin, light, low-power, no-fan laptops (At the time called Netbooks)

Apple's great idea was to try to do tablets again at that time, AND make the interface touch screen, AND use the interface from their successful iPhone, which was fabulous and perfect for mobile computing; the Windows 7/Vista desktop was not up to touch-based mobile computing.

Re:Who cares about?

[thewebdude]

What about the Newton? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_Newton

Re:Who cares about?

[thewebdude]

Or the Knowledge Navigator? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Knowledge_Navigator

Re: Who cares about?

[girlintraining]

I'm not sure, but the end of the line must be coming soon.

Meanwhile, Balmer was seen walking nearby, complaining about how this stairway never seemed to end, and how poorly designed it was because the banister was so low.

Re:Who cares about?

[skeib]

I'm not sure when MS came up with their first tablet sketches, but Apple made this film in 1987: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JIE8xk6Rl1w

It's scaringly accurate.

Re: Who cares about?

[Dupple]

Not until they have moved their proprietary software to another platform...

Re:Who cares about?

[skeib]

So what you're saying is that MS chose to make a shitty product and launch it prematurely, while Apple chose to wait until the right hardware was available and then design a suitable OS for it?

Sounds about right :)

Re:Who cares about?

[linebackn]

Microsoft usually can see the train coming long before it arrives.

In my reading of its history, Microsoft has spent a good deal of its existence catching up with one train or another. Two notable examples: GUIs and the internet.

That is what it looks like in retrospect, but to put it metaphorically, Microsoft was already on a different train hoping it would take them where THEY wanted to go.

In the case of the Internet, they were on the train headed for making their proprietary MSN service the one true ultimate information service. I think they kind of hoped the Internet would just go away, but that didn't happen. :)

In the case of the GUI, they were already on the train of supporting and enhancing existing DOS software. It wasn't even entirely in their hands as they weren't the ones producing the hardware (How would you do a GUI when you were expected to support IBM monotext video cards?)

And now they are on they are on the tablet craze train, when outside of Apple, that is not where the rest of the world is going.

Re:Who cares about?

[Scoth]

with the full processing power, heat, noise, etc of the laptops of the day.

This was where they failed for me. I had a couple different Fujitsu Stylistics, and overall I loved it. OneNote was great for notes, and had pretty decent handwriting recognition. I could run any Windows application, and overall it did great. I could sync notes across devices and access them anywhere. It was pretty impressive stuff for ~2000. But the big downfall was the jet engine fan and battery life. I'd be in a quiet classroom or office meeting, and the fan would kick on. I'd get That Look from people and it got old. I also usually only managed to get 2-3 hours out of it, although I did have a spare battery I'd carry around for it. I usually had enough juice to last a whole day of college classes, but sometimes not.

It'd also get pretty darn hot when I was doing anything that ran it very hard, but note-taking didn't usually do that.

Re:Who cares about?

[Bert64]

The problem is they are too tied to the idea of tying everything to windows...

They put windows on a tablet, and the interface of both the os and its applications were unsuitable for tablets, making them awkward to use and thus undesirable. Apple didn't tie their tablet to osx, they made a different systems designed for a touch interface and it sold.

Similarly microsoft refuse to accept that windows is a poison pill, they seem to think that people love the brand and will buy anything thats branded as windows when in reality they are more like an incumbent monopoly telco - they have lots of customers in their core market because they are seen as the only game in town, but they are almost universally despised and people will actively avoid them when they have a choice.

Windows is associated with crashing, unreliability, complexity and malware... Users now believe that these are inherent and unavoidable problems in the computer market, and don't want to bring these problems to their phones.

Re:Who cares about?

[Scoth]

Microsoft released Windows for Pen Computing somewhere around Windows 3.1 (1991ish?). The Pen addons continued through the 9x releases. Granted it's not really a tablet initiative by Microsoft personally, but they dabbled in it. It worked reasonably well, and was a full real copy of Windows. They pretty much suffered the same limitations as later Tablet PCs (and today's tablets), though. Mousing was great, any sort of data input was a giant pain and pretty much required an addon keyboard.

Re:Who cares about?

[Lumpy]

Because apple did it right.

Honestly Microsoft tried the tablet 5 times before then and screwed it up every single time. Granted the first time back when Windows 3.1 for pen computing came out it was a technology problem.

But everything that microsoft does is half assed, unless they BUY someone elses product and sell it as their own.. Like the Xbox.

Re:Who cares about?

[Anonymous Coward]

"Apple launched the iPad and it was thinner, lighter, cooler-running and longer-lasting than any major laptop of the time. Laptops were just starting to hit the 5 pound mark and still be usable, iPad was around 1 pound. laptops were still pushing 15-16" displays very hard, the iPad was right around 9 inches diagonal. Laptops were generally between 1 and 2 hours run time, the iPad did anywhere from 8 hours on up, depending on how you had power management set up."

Your memory is flawed. My tablet at the release of the ipad (a hp tx2000 variant from 2008-2009) was lighter (4.3 pounds), was smaller (12") and had a longer battery life (about 4h with the small battery) than the picture you are trying to paint of that time frame. All in all it was a nice laptop though a bit expensive and the touchscreen was crap. It died due to faulty nvidia crap.

The ipad on the other hand was 40% heavyer with its 1.4 pounds.

Re: Who cares about?

[Anonymous Coward]

MS-based tablets of one sort or another have been available for over a decade. Not only that but MS had the resources available to work with an OEM to make one that didn't weigh a couple of pounds, exhaust the battery in a few hours and be reasonably responsive. Yet they failed at all that. If anyone a MS is bitter at Apple, then they still fail to see the problem.

Re:Who cares about?

[mysidia]

So what you're saying is that MS chose to make a shitty product and launch it prematurely, while Apple chose to wait until the right hardware was available and then design a suitable OS for it?

Yes, but Apple waited a lot longer than they needed to -- probably in order to get it "perfect", in Steves' eyes, and they made a good first impression.

While Apple was wasting much time; engineering the most aesthetically pure tablet they could muster, and worrying about very small improvements in size and weight --- MS was busy making and then trying to fix Vista.

Netbooks and Ultrabooks were becoming popular at the time --- the very low power CPU options were available, multitouch, and all the tech required to make a tablet.

Hell.. TechCrunch was working on the Crunchpad (before one of their vendors double-crossed them, stole their intellectual property, and went to develop JooJoo pad on their own)

Microsoft had plenty of time and opportunity to adapt their Tablet PC to a lighter design, improve the touch experience, and release a tablet faster than Apple, which would be a credible offering; and, by the way, cannibalize much of Apple's prospects in the tablet market.

The fact of the matter is... Microsoft must have been asleep at the switch.

Frankly, there should have been firings within their management team, for not seeing this.

Microsoft failed to recognize the problems that had made their Tablet PC not so successful, and failed to recognize changes in available technology, that would enable them to pivot, and change their product into a successful one satisfying customer needs.

And they failed to execute on the opportunity: that should have been visible plain as day, to anyone with any vision in that company.

Re:Who cares about?

[davester666]

Bill's idea is that everybody wanted to interact with the tablet using a pen, so much so that it was REQUIRED to use it. Turns out, people don't really want to use a pen with the tablet, except in very specific circumstances.

And then the Office team told the tablet OS group to fuck off, that they wouldn't change ANYTHING to make Office work better using the tablet interface. This is the surprising part, that Bill didn't just slap the head of the Office team and tell him to make Office work right with the tablet OS.

Re:Who cares about?

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't know, but the metaphor is still chugging along just fine, so don't derail it.

Re:Who cares about?

[phantomfive]

MSN was after Microsoft already had the idea of the internet. See "The Road Ahead" for a demonstration of how badly they missed it.

Re:Who cares about?

[Kjella]

That's still not counting the biggest reason it sucked so hard and that was that it had a touchscreen but it wasn't designed to use with your fingers. I had one demonstrated to me and there was hardly anything you could get done without the stylus because the interface required pinpoint precision, which made it more like a laptop with a very awkward mouse. As far as I can recall it wasn't multi-touch either which was fine for the stylus but means you couldn't do pinches and stretches nor fast typing. I remember it had some sort of letter recognition for the stylus but it required a special technique and was still way more awkward than any other text input method. And it was way too expensive for a second device, whereas most current tablet owners haven't thrown out their desktop/laptop.

Re:Who cares about?

[mcgrew]

If Microsoft's attempt at a tablet wasn't so abysmal, people would have bought it. They're just not that good at interfaces.

Re: Who cares about?

[Anonymous Coward]

Ultrabooks came out after the iPad.

Re:Who cares about?

[gtall]

"They are still bitter that they had the idea for a tablet long before Apple", not really. They took a thing that had no keyboard and bunged window onto and then expected people to use it for...what precisely? Apple took a small energy sipping processor and combined it with an app store and a gui that didn't smell like dog's breath.

Re:Who cares about?

[RR]

Apple started work on Newton in the 1980s, released it in 1993, and discontinued it in 1998.

But the idea for tablets has been around since computers gained user interfaces. The most famous is Alan Kay's Dynabook from 1972.

Pen-driven and portable computers come in waves. There was the GRiDPad generation in the 1980s (roughly ending with Windows for Pen Computing). There was the EPOC generation in the 1990s (from which we get the Microsoft product, WinCE). There was the TabletPC generation, promoted by Bill Gates but sabotaged by the Office division. Now we're in the iOS and Android era.

Re:Who cares about?

[slimjim8094]

To be fair about the GPS thing, it was operational by 1993 (ads are 93-94) and given the success of LORAN, it was pretty clear that the ability to precisely locate one's self would be extremely useful to civilians (though this was before Clinton declared that it would officially be a "dual use system"). Toss in a little bit of Moore's Law and it was reasonable to expect that it wouldn't be too long before you could store road information, compute a route, render it in real-time, and synthesize audio to describe it.

Though I agree, those are a pretty impressive series of ads. Funny what they got wrong - that we'd be sending a fax instead of high-resolution images or live video from the beach, or that we'd make a full screen video call from a phone booth instead of a playing-card sized cellphone or magazine-sized tablet. And the strong AI right at the end.

Re:Who cares about?

[Anonymous Coward]

ATT ran a series of advertisements in the early 1990s. In which they featured a pen-based computer "sending a fax from the beach" and a computer in a car giving turn-by-turn directions.

Before the advent of modern cellular technology, wireless data, and GPS.

If you bothered to check you would find GPS was operational in 1985 and I recall James Burke showing off some flavor of satellite navigation in the original Connections.

Re:Who cares about?

[symbolset]

I think I see the light at the end of the tunnel.

Re:Who cares about?

[Anonymous Coward]

What the heck are you talking about man? The first gen iPad came out in 2010, when netbooks had been on the market for what, four years already? Granted, even the best of them were somewhat heavier and had worse battery life than the iPad, but IIRC we're talking something like 2 pounds (netbook) vs 1 pound (iPad) and 6-7 hours (netbook) vs 8-10 hours (iPad)..

Re:Who cares about?

[Darinbob]

The internet is a series of colonic tubes.

Re:Who cares about?

[Darinbob]

Tablet PC seemed to want to cache in on the boom of PDAs, acting as if the whole point was a pen like interface for taking notes rather than it being a tiny pocket sized device

Re:Who cares about?

[petermgreen]

To be fair Microsoft and their partner's idea of a tablet was a latop with a touchscreen that could be flipped arround so it was on the outside when closed. This DID appeal to some niches but for the most part it was considered a pain to use. You pretty much had to put the thing on a desk because there was no reasonable way you could hold and use it at the same time and the interface still needed a stylus to use.

Apple's idea of a tablet (later copied by many andriod vendors) was a larger version of their smartphone platform. This meant it was much smaller and lighter than the tablet laptops and came with apps that worked well with finger (not stylus) touch.

Yes both fit the definition of "tablet" but they came at the problem from totally different directions and the direction apple took worked far better for most consumers given the constraints at the time.

Now where things get interesting is where the two meet in the middle. ASUS has come out with the EEEPAD transformer but it was crippled by the fact that the OS was not designed as a laptop OS. MS had a FANTASTIC oppertunity here. Processors had started to appear with enough power to put in a reasonablly thin tablet and powerful enough to run a fully fledged desktop/laptop OS. MS spent a lot of money adding a tablet focussed interface to thier desktop/laptop OS and porting it to arm.

But they blew it.. They crippled the arm port of windows so that third party desktop apss could not be run. They put out advertising that showed people screwing arround with docking and undocking the keyboard rather than actually showing people WHY they should choose the surface over it's competitors. Apparently there was a surface pro commercial (though I never saw it on this side of the pond) and it did show some officey stuff but it was too stylised to tell it was the "real thing" and not some crippled version like other tablets have.

Re:Who cares about?

[tapi0]

"is associated with crashing, unreliability, complexity and malware.....and don't want to bring these problems to their phones."
don't know about that, android seems to be a big seller.

Re:Who cares about?

[ThisIsSaei2561]

I've already lost track of the metaphor. Some of these replies completely derailed the thread.

Re:Who cares about?

[dbIII]

that we'd be sending a fax

It's 2013 and we're still sending and receiving faxes. I don't know why even some of the largest companies in the world insist on faxes instead of email but it happens.

Re:Who cares about?

[LinuxIsGarbage]

It was starting to lose steam anyways.

Re:Who cares about?

[LinuxIsGarbage]

Occasionally I'll get a drawing from a vendor that looks like it was printed, scanned using a fax to pdf service, then emailed to me.

The resolution is so terrible I can't make out half the dimensions.

Re: Who cares about?

[Anonymous Coward]

Ultrabooks came out after the iPad.

No! Ultrabooks came after netbooks.

Re:Who cares about?

[DMUTPeregrine]

Microsoft's problem with tablets is that they want the same interface on the tablet as on the desktop. That doesn't work well. Mouse-based and touch-based interfaces have fundamental differences. Microsoft finally came up with a touch-based interface for Windows 8, and unfortunately they've decided to push it onto the desktop. They made the same mistake, just going in the opposite direction. The Surface Pro (RT has its own issues) is a pretty nice tablet. But Win8 on a desktop or laptop is awful.

Re:Who cares about?

[gl4ss]

but it's impossible to make pro sw that would work as expected without bending the metro rules too much and hence you have no nice sw. you can't have sw that makes it nice.

well, you can. but that's the extra unofficial sw for the x86 version that makes metro apps windowable..

as to selling out : it's real fucking easy to explain, they only made 1/20th of the production run compared to last years surface.

Re:Who cares about?

[MouseTheLuckyDog]

Actually 1999 is only the time period when MS created their own hardware design for a tablet. Before that they were pushing Windows for Pen, a Windows 3.1 based tablet OS. WfP was generally miserable, mostly vaporware. It was created soley for the purpose of putting GO Computing out of business. ( Why by a GO tablet when you can buy a fully interoperable WfP tablet ? )

GO computing and the Netwon were near simultaneous creations. In fact AT&T made tablets in 1991 using the GO os.

After the Newton failed and GO was destroyed by MS, tablet computing faded for a while--except for certain niche areas--I remember statistics collecting companies interested, and UPS/FedEx/ DHS/others, used primitive tablets because portable computing was important.

It was some time during this period of neglect that Bill Gates took up the tablet as a note taking device. He was the first one who was seriously pushing for a long period of time.

On another note, it was John Sculley who pushed real hard for the Newton. The initial Mac was supposed to be Steve Jobs redemption. Proving that Woz was not the only genius at Apple. In the same sense the Newton was to be Sculley redemption, showing that Apple could get along without Jobs.

Kind of ironic that now it's Jobs who gets the most credit for inventing the tablet.

Re:Who cares about?

[rtb61]

Apples were smart. Apple specifically targeted their own specific bling, fad and gadget buying customers and got them to buy it, they tied this in with a saturation marketing campaign and 'FAILED', the got very little market penetration beyond their own existing customer base. The thing I remember most from this time is Apple customers using their iPad to play with their pets and the B$ about iPad being used in preference to large screen desk tops for creative work.

What M$ didn't have was a market for the high priced, unsafe to drop, tablet, like Apple had for their toy computer, people who already ownded an iPod, iPhone and whatever Apple branded computer. People who would buy with little application or use in mind other than to play and pose with it.

Re:Who cares about?

[bemymonkey]

This, a thousand times this. I own a Windows 8 tablet and I spend nearly all my time in desktop apps, because pretty much every Metro app ever written is just plain subpar. The one exception (and even that's a stretch, what with all the missing features) is IE, funnily enough, which is just barely usable.

If I didn't need OneNote/PDF Annotator and general Windows-style multitasking, I'd definitely be using an Android tablet.

Re:Who cares about?

[Anonymous Coward]

Market share means nothing if there are not enough usable apps. Many new apps are Android or iOS, but not Windows 8 tablet.

Re:Who cares about?

[Anonymous Coward]

Forget Sun, try Palm! The palm pilot was like, half smartphone, half tablet. It's just that the technology was immature at the time.

Re:Who cares about?

[Anonymous Coward]

MS's tablet was the CE interface using a stylus. Not a finger touch OS with an ecosystem of apps that can make use of that. Try using MS Word on a tablet with a stylus and you can see why it didn't sell.

Re:Who cares about?

[Anonymous Coward]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_for_Pen_Computing

Re:Who cares about?

[FireFury03]

The problem is they are too tied to the idea of tying everything to windows...

They put windows on a tablet, and the interface of both the os and its applications were unsuitable for tablets, making them awkward to use and thus undesirable. Apple didn't tie their tablet to osx, they made a different systems designed for a touch interface and it sold.

Apple *did* use an existing platform on their tablets: iPhone OS. If they had come out with a tablet with a brand new platform then it probably would've been a flop - having no third party software would've been a big problem.

What Apple did was create the iPhone - originally this ran *no* third party software at all (hell, even though it was marketted as a smartphone, it really wasn't - there were a very limited selection of built in apps and it didn't do many of the things people had come to expect from a smartphone). What they did get right was that they were about the first phone to incorporate a decent web browser - that appealed to the masses, even though the lack of "normal" smartphone features made it not appeal to a lot of the usual smartphone demographic.

People started to jailbreak iPhones so they could build third party software, and a few years down the line Apple created their appstore and allowed official third party applications. By the time they started selling the iPad, they already had a big following of iPhone fanboys and a huge library of third party apps - these are the things that made the iPad worth having.

Android tablets are basically the same story - by the time they became available there were already a *lot* of happy android phone users and a big library of third party software. When you're happy with your phone, buying a tablet that runs exactly the same OS and can run all your favorite apps is a much lower risk than something that is completely unknown to you.

Similarly, MS have always wanted to keep their existing users and existing third party software library when they release a tablet - if they release a tablet with a brand new OS (which people are therefore not familiar with, making buying the device a bigger risk for them) and no third party software then they aren't going to sell well... which is *exactly* what they are seeing with Windows RT.

MS's problem is that they completely missed the boat with phones, so now they have no "popular" platform to shove on a tablet except Windows itself, which is completely unsuitable. They also seem to be foolishly muddying the waters by using the "windows" brand on Windows RT, despite it not being at all compatible with Windows... I guess they're hoping they can sucker a few people into buying an otherwise unknown OS by misleading them to believe its something they are familiar with.

Re:Who cares about?

[LordWabbit2]

It was more than that. Timing was everything, the prevalence of wireless networking and the fact that a LOT more people were using the internet and would have a need for a tablet. Think about it, when MS first tried for a tablet most people didn't even have a PC or if they did they had one for the entire family.

Re:Who cares about?

[jandersen]

The problem is they are too tied to the idea of tying everything to windows...

I'm not sure Windows as such is the problem - it is not a bad concept for a GUI desktop, in many ways. I think the real problem is this: they think like managers.

I have worked in the industry for 25 years, as developer on both MVS, DOS, Windows, OS/2, UNIX and Linux. There has always been this dicsonnect between what managers think motivates people, and what really motivates engineers. I don't know how many times I have been "awarded" with something that wouldn't want to own even as a gift - lumps of perspex, basically. They were probably quite expensive, some of them - like, a pair of cuff-links worth $300 or something - but just so utterly misplaced; I would have been happier with something useful - a bag of nails, a good quality hammer, of one of these:

http://www.keyboardco.com/keyboard_details.asp?PRODUCT=12

- in short, something useful of good quality. Managers dno't understand this - in a way they refuse to understand, and that, I think is what Microsoft does on a grand scale: they produce a lump of perspex, and it has worked as a business model, because they sold to managers who love this kind of things. But in the real world, a lump of perspex is just a lump, and it invariably gets left behind at the bottom of a box.

Re:Who cares about?

[mindwhip]

If you ask me Microsoft need to get back on track, put the brakes and stop the Metro bandwagon before they hit the buffers and their share price crashes.

Re:Who cares about?

[Anonymous Coward]

And, yet, they seem to be running out of steam.

Re:Who cares about?

[Anonymous Coward]

You need to go back farther than that. .- They bought DOS from that guy in Seattle. Well, what would later become DOS anyway, still not their product to start with .- The GUI came from Xerox PARC, but they actually "stole" it after Apple had licensed the thing and worked with MS to make software for it. .- They bought Word, Excel and PowerPoint from other companies.

MS cash cows were not their products to start with... though they've "refined" them over the years, improved the integration between the products and so on.

Even Internet Explorer was late to the internet game, and they managed to get market share by winning the, so called, first browser war. ...and the few ideas they've had for original products, as it seems, haven't been all that sucessful at the time they first brought them to market. Years later, when someone else gives it a try (with a different spin, presentation, target or what have you) and it gains some track and starts selling, then MS comes back and gives it their own spin and start selling a relatively small number since they're not the market leaders or perceived as the innovators in each case.

Bonus round: the XBox was created to compete with the Playstation 2.

Re:Who cares about?

[narcc]

I disagree. The pen is not only essential for many applications to which a tablet is uniquely suited, but superior to touch input in many more common applications. People immediately recognized this, and it's clear that they really want to use a pen, as evidenced by the countless third-party styluses that flooded the market shortly after the iPad hit the market.

Eliminating the stylus, and ridiculing its use, was a huge mistake on Apple's part. That will come back to bite them in the next few years as the market matures and consumers begin to demand that tables offer support for a proper stylus.

Re:Who cares about?

[David Gerard]

Microsoft certainly was pushing tablet computers extremely hard, for a long time before the iPad.

Turns out ideas are cheap and execution matters.

Re:Who cares about?

[cyber-vandal]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Light_pen

Re:Who cares about?

[Lumpy]

Exactly! Microsoft got the handwriting recognition almost perfect back in the early days. It went to hell later after they found out they were infringing on patents and changed it completely.

The problem is that they also tried a lot of lock in. For example, the very first smart car stereo, the Clarion AutoPC ran windows and used the Auto PC platform. they crippled it so that unless you paid for the "signing" of your app the app will not run in the background an it completely killed the platform. Plus Clarion made everything "special" so that you could not design any add on's without paying through the nose to use their special connector (It was USB with 4 more wires to carry audio and Composite video)

This is Microsofts legacy. Innovate but make it die because they will not open it up to get everyone to design for the platform.

Re:Who cares about?

[inicom]

Just thought I'd add to that: Microsoft had Xenix before DOS. They were on the Unix car and jumped off.

Re:Who cares about?

[intermodal]

Apple backdoored themselves into the market with the iPhone. Nobody cared about tablets until Apple made a really useful smartphone. When the applications that people found useful ran short of screen real-estate, Apple brought a huge iPhone without the phone to the market, and promised it as a way to make those apps more useful. And they were right. They presented it as an upgrade to the existing paradigm.

Microsoft, on the other hand, made the Surface as a step down from full PC/laptop. Being better than a smartphone will always beat being worse than a PC.

Re:Who cares about?

[Anonymous Coward]

Microsoft's tablet failure is logical and comes from how they make their money, windows and Word/Excel.
As a company when they got together to plan the requirements for a tablet they could only say:
- need big hard drive to store all our software. People can't buy software that won't fit on the hard drive
- need a keyboard because nobody would do word processing on an on-screen keyboard and if you don't sell Word, that tablet is no good for Microsoft.
- need a pen cause otherwise you need to redesign the whole GUI that requires a precise pointer.
- need a fast CPU because the user needs to run latest and greatest Word and Excel. It doesn't matter that Word 6 was fine and ran great with 4MB of RAM and a 33MHz CPU... Because that's obsolete and the software division doesn't want to go back to that era of computing.

So anything close to the iPad was a non-starter for them. Even though it was rather obvious after seeing Palm devices, Newton, the Nokia N770, the iPhone etc.

Re:Who cares about?

[Capt.Albatross]

Microsoft usually can see the train coming long before it arrives.

In my reading of its history, Microsoft has spent a good deal of its existence catching up with one train or another. Two notable examples: GUIs and the internet.

That is what it looks like in retrospect...

I recall it looking that way at the time, too. Of course, in each case, there was a lag between when the train left the station and when Microsoft realized it needed to be on it, and in that interval, it was preoccupied with the things you describe.

The tablet/touch part must hurt because, for once, they were pioneers of the software technology (albeit on a mainframe-sized surface), but then they repeated Xerox' canonical mistake (that's definitely a retrospective view - I didn't see it coming at the time. I am a curmudgeon in these matters, and for most purposes, I still find a mouse to be superior to any of its supposed replacements, including touch - Englebart was a genius.)

Re:Who cares about?

[tlhIngan]

They are still bitter that they had the idea for a tablet long before Apple, but when they announced it, it was to a big yawn. When Apple did it, everyone pissed themselves like excited dogs, and then when Microsoft tried again... everyone said they stole the idea from Apple. Microsoft usually can see the train coming long before it arrives. For some reason though, they rarely manage to get on the train. Execution and follow-through has always been a problem for the organization; Especially now that the CEO is a dancing monkey-man who knows the price of everything but the value of nothing.

Except there was a collective yawn at Apple's announcement as well. It was so bad, the tech press was wondering who would buy one, and even Jobs muttered that if they didn't sell, he'd lower the price more.

It would be more akin to the iPod launch - a big collective yawn at "another MP3 player?".

Of course, the two things it did do was run all iOS apps, and Apple did a lot of developer seeding so day 1 there would've been plenty of iPad (or iPhone/iPad) apps.

Also didn't hurt that Apple didn't go the Microsoft route and try to adapt OS X for touchscreens (like Microsoft did for Windows - Pen Windows/Windows for Pens and other adaptations intended to get full blown Windows on tablets) because UI interactions between keyboard an mouse and touch are different (see Microsoft going the wrong way again with tablet UIs for desktops).

Of course, it's "low" cost ($500 killed many competitors attempts at releasing a tablet - everyone anticipated $1000 and the likes of Acer and Asus were going to release PC tablets for $800 or so), and long battery life (10 hours) helped, as well as trying to avoid being a complete PC replacement.

Re:Who cares about?

[Rob Y.]

It worked reasonably well, and was a full real copy of Windows.

Microsoft's strength and weakness in a single sentence. It seems the major selling point of all Microsoft platforms is the "full real copy of Windows". I.e., the promise that all that software written for the Windows desktop monopoly will somehow provide the leverage to make whatever platform MS supports win. And the major weakness, of course, is that they insist on cramming a 'full real copy of Windows" onto form factors where it doesn't make sense (i.e. "it works only reasonably well - or requires expensive hardware to work at all").

They wasted years on a windows phone platform marketed based on 'Windows Familiarity (tm)', as iOS and Android proceded to win. Apparently cramming a totally hobbled version of Windows CE onto a phone wasn't any kind of a panacea. WP7/8 are better, but too late. Alas, without the Windows monopoly effect, you really need to be a little quicker on your feet than MS has traditionally been. Now they're trying to exploit the monopoly effect for tablets. The RT, which could be a nice true tablet, unfortunately doesn't have the Windows apps. And the Pro is too much software for the form factor. It may develop into a nice niche for people who really need some WIN32 app, but won't work well for most people, who really just need a $200 Nexus or Kindle.

Re:Who cares about?

[slimjim8094]

Without a doubt people still use faxes, and it's stupid. But for most people (and arguably everybody at the beach) the wireless data they're going to be sending is not a fax. Instead it'll be a 12-million pixel image they took with a playing-card sized (but slightly thicker) device. Oh, and it'll probably go faster than the fax they sent in that video (well, it depends on the beach).

Re:Who cares about?

[aurizon]

Microsoft, and Blackberry saw the Apple train start 5 years ago, not going my way they said, and ignored it.
They both should have started crash programs to understand and catch up.

Then they heard a noise, looked up, and the train was aimed at them and they could not get out of the way, and the 5 years was wasted.

Apple seems to have a better way of making decisions early in the game, of allowing ideas to gather resources internally and have groups kick ideas around and build them up until they can become a viable product. This is not easy. Apple might have had hundreds of ideas that they think-tanked and killed off, but at least they had the ideas. Google is a lot like this as well.

I get the impression that new ideas have a hard time gathering headway in Microsoft, that petty corporate politics determines if an idea is good or bad and not the intrinsic merits of the idea, so good ideas are starved of resources and destroyed and the bad ideas of the favorites are fed resources, which go to waste.

How can Microsoft change? Hard to say?, those in power will cling to it. They need a new board that does not cling to useless cronies for too long - look how long that drone Ballmer stayed on top, killing one good idea after another. How do I know this? I do not know for sure, but since all the ideas that came out of their stable were duds, the good ones must have been head shot early on.

Re: Who cares about?

[Anonymous Coward]

If your target is set low low low, then they are probably right. MS has concoured the base of the mountain.

Re:Who cares about?

[davester666]

Man, I almost bit at that.

That is some excellent sarcasm.

Re:Who cares about?

[Anonymous Coward]

No, davester666 had it right when he wrote, "people don't really want to use a pen with the tablet, except in very specific circumstances."

Yes, pen input is useful, and even superior to finger input, in some circumstances. However, those circumstances are limited, and a system which requires a stylus for *all* useful input is of limited usefulness in any other circumstances (of which there are many). The myriad of styluses that exist were made to fill the demand people had in those circumstances where the pen is a better input device.

As for your claim that '"eliminating the stylus...was a huge mistake on Apple's part", I submit the millions of smartphone and tablet users who have never even considered the need for a stylus when using their modern devices which were designed with the finger in mind as the primary interface. Capacitive styluses are cheap as dirt, and can be found in virtually any gas station even, but most people don't own one. Why? Because for most people, the stylus is entirely superfluous when it comes to using their phone or tablet. It is not a primary interface device, it is a specialized interface device better suited than the finger for only a comparatively few use cases.

Re:Who cares about?

[Anonymous Coward]

Apples were smart. Apple specifically targeted their own specific bling, fad and gadget buying customers and got them to buy it, they tied this in with a saturation marketing campaign and 'FAILED', the got very little market penetration beyond their own existing customer base. The thing I remember most from this time is Apple customers using their iPad to play with their pets and the B$ about iPad being used in preference to large screen desk tops for creative work.

What M$ didn't have was a market for the high priced, unsafe to drop, tablet, like Apple had for their toy computer, people who already ownded an iPod, iPhone and whatever Apple branded computer. People who would buy with little application or use in mind other than to play and pose with it.

Wow. Your 'memory' of events is possibly the thing least connected to reality that I've seen in quite some time. (And I'm counting Republican congress-critters' nonsense claims about 'Obamacare'.)

Re:Who cares about?

[sapgau]

Amen to that.

Re:Who cares about?

[Bert64]

But iPhone OS was designed for touch, there's a reason why they used this and not desktop OSX which isn't.
The ipad is basically a large iphone or ipod touch... Had they used OSX and made it run desktop applications it likely would have flopped.

And yes they muddied the waters with windows mobile and windows ce, i know a few people who bought old phones or the cheap wince-based laptops expecting to be able to run windows applications on them, only to find they can't.

Re:Who cares about?

[Bert64]

Well a gui desktop is a terrible concept for use on a phone or a tablet...
A gui desktop is also a terrible concept for a server etc too.

Something actually designed for the role will almost always do a better job than something else that's just been repurposed, and the repurposing might make it very poor at doing its original job (see metro).

Re:Who cares about?

[Raenex]

I am a curmudgeon in these matters, and for most purposes, I still find a mouse to be superior to any of its supposed replacements, including touch - Englebart was a genius.

A mouse is a great device, but it isn't portable. I prefer a stylus for precision on portables, but everybody seems to hate them.

2 available for preorder, 1 sold

[master_kaos]

Nearly sold out! But the 1 was sold to Ballmer, as an expensive coaster.

Re: 2 available for preorder, 1 sold

[O('_')O_Bush]

Yea, I thought manufacturing was supposed to scale with demand, which is why almost no other companies make announcements every time a batch is consumed.

Re:2 available for preorder, 1 sold

[jaredm1]

Was he reported to throw it across the room when he heard it too did not come with Solitaire? I mean, how else was it gonna help him get through inane board meetings!?

Re:2 available for preorder, 1 sold

[PolygamousRanchKid]

Actually, Microsoft should give Ballmer a gold-plated Surface when he retires, and then retire the brand. "Good-bye, Mr. Ballmer, and please take your Surface with you." The Surface 1 & 2 were Ballmer's. The Surface 3, which is probably in development now, would also be his. The new CEO should just scrap the Surface 3 plans, and start again.

Pick a small team of the best and brightest Microsoft hardware and software engineers, and task them with creating an astonishing new product. This must have something entirely new, useful and unique, that people will crave to buy it. Making something just as good, or even slightly better than current Apple or Android stuff isn't going to sell. And Surface is a cursed brand now.

I'm guessing that Microsoft does have folks with really great ideas . . . but no one in Microsoft is listening to them. They're just shriveling away somewhere, buried underneath the bureaucracy. The new CEO just needs to dust things off, shake and rattle it a bit, and see what great ideas fall out.

Now if Elop ascends as the next CEO . . . I'm not sure this will happen.

Re: 2 available for preorder, 1 sold

[Anonymous Coward]

The problem that they slap some flavour of Windows on it.

Like crack addicts they can't let go of Windows and its incurable shityness.

They would need to create an OS from scratch and avoid everything Windows did. And they just can't do it.

I guess they like to fail.

lower production volume?

[Anonymous Coward]

if they are truly "selling out" it's only because the new models' production runs were a tiny fraction of their predecessors.

Re:lower production volume?

[Anonymous Coward]

Maybe Surface 2 is nearly sold out but my invention of "pet lint in-a-box" was such a hit it sold out first day (production volume of 1). So now sold-out figures point to making "pet lint in-a-box version 2). MS, we how to screw with sales bs too!

Re:lower production volume?

[ozmanjusri]

"Tens of thousands of Microsoft (NSDQ:MSFT) Surface tablets with Windows RT, a device the channel has yet to see, are being sold at deeply discounted prices or simply given away to teachers and schools over the next month, prompting some to question if Microsoft's recent price slashing has more to do with unloading inventory than with pushing into the education vertical.
" http://www.crn.com/news/channel-programs/240157205/microsoft-surface-rt-dumping-inventory-or-investing-in-education.htm

Yeah but...

[Dr_b_]

They only made one unit.

Re:Yeah but...

[mwvdlee]

They nearly sold out when, at the counter, the customer said "Cool, now I can finally use some apps" to which the salesman replied "Oh, I'm sorry, you have the wrong tablet, let me get you an iPad or Android tablet".

Re:Yeah but...

[Dogtanian]

They nearly sold out when, at the counter, the customer said "Cool, now I can finally use some apps" to which the salesman replied "Oh, I'm sorry, you have the wrong tablet, let me get you an iPad or Android tablet".

Yeah, right. More like the salesman got triple commission for helping shift their dust-gathering stock of Surface tablets, lied through his/her/its teeth about the apps it could run and will deny ever having said any of that when the pissed-off customer returns.

Re:Yeah but...

[real-modo]

But in most countries and states consumers have the right to return products within a short time period after sale.

Sales people hate processing returns. The process is deliberately made awkward and time-consuming, and time spent on them is time spent giving back your commission, and time not selling anything.

Result: salespeople will steer people away from bad products unless they get commission whether or not the sale "sticks", and they don't have to process returns.

So, I doubt many sales people are acting as you describe.

i don't buy it

[Anonymous Coward]

...and haven't seen a single one of them in the wild. For a productthat's closeto selling out, I'd expectto see at least one in the wild.

I don't believe a word they say

[DavidinAla]

Given the fact that Microsoft has shown a willingness to badly mislead on this subject, the company has zero credibility about it. It's possible they're being completely honest and accurate about it this time, but since we've seen them lie (or "mislead" to put it charitably) before, how can we know? This is common for many, many companies, but when a company starts down this road, we lose the ability to trust anything they say in the future.

Hooray, marketing!

[Rinikusu]

If anything, a good marketer is worth her weight in gold. A story I once heard about the importation of fabric from India (Madras fabric, although no one in what was once called madras knows it as such.. it's just fabric there...) that it was cheap and durable, but the colors bled something awful when washed. Customers were returning clothing made from this fabric in droves for the "defect" of fading. The industry was losing their asses and turned to a marketer.. who turned it around by marketing the fade as a feature, not a bug ("Something magical happens when washed!").

I think the same thing is at work, here, but I'm not so sure anyone still wants to be a turd, no matter how much Mugatu wraps it up in tin foil.

Re:Hooray, marketing!

[bitt3n]

If anything, a good marketer is worth her weight in gold.

If that's so, why aren't the morbidly obese more employable?

Re:Hooray, marketing!

[geoskd]

If that's so, why aren't the morbidly obese more employable?

Because they are not very good at marketing. Duh.

Re:Hooray, marketing!

[ColdWetDog]

Yes, a great marketer is an useful asset. For some reason, Microsoft has managed to miss the boat, train and pretty much every other bit of transport when it comes to selecting a marketing plan. "You make a grown man cry" (Windows 95). Dozens of confusing names - Surface, Surface Pro, Surface RT, Windows RT, this, that. Dozens of confusing Skus. Zune brown. ** Any ** consumer oriented Microsoft advert.

It's not that Apple is so polished marketing wise, it's just that Microsoft continuously manages to swing and miss. I'm not sure they even understand that they're supposed to face the pitcher's mound.

Re:Hooray, marketing!

[spitzak]

"It's waterproof!"

"...uh, no it isn't..."

"Well then, it's water resistant!"

"...uh, no it isn't..."

"Then it's water absorbant!"

We can trust them

[symbolset]

They would never lie to us.

Re:We can trust them

[asmkm22]

I'm actually getting really tired of this type of comment. I see it pretty much every time a company or government is involved in the story. Yeah I get it; you can't trust them. Can we move on now and stop fishing for easy mod points with obvious posts?

Re:We can trust them

[Anonymous Coward]

Not as long as this type of comment is an auto +5. The consumer has spoken and they demand more!

Re:We can trust them

[sjames]

It may seem obvious to you, but then the fanbois and apologists show up and prove that it's less obvious than you would hope.

Re:We can trust them

[Anonymous Coward]

Alternatively, you can simply ignore them, or are you so high and mighty the world has to bend to your preferences?

Re:We can trust them

[spire3661]

We keep repeating it because other morons keep forgetting it.

Re:We can trust them

[Anonymous Coward]

We'll move on when they fix the shit. Not before.

Hey I murdered someone last week. But can't we just move on? Geez.

Re:We can trust them

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually, no, they really would not. They have whole departments that do notting else but bullet prove any press release so no one can claim they are lying. You really need to learn the difference between lying and corporate speech.

Re:We can trust them

[Alef]

I don't know, to me it's about as predictable and unnuanced as a so called fanboi comment. I read it as a satirically formulated straw man argument in support of a cynical standpoint that one should put absolutely zero trust in anything a government or corporation says. A standpoint which I find rather disingenuous.

Certainly they could lie to us, but most likely they are not. For whatever reason, many corporate leaders and politicians seem to adhere to a curious ethic where blatant lies are shunned, while deception or dishonest interpretations are perfectly okay. There is a difference between the two, because the latter can help you penetrate and understand what they are really saying. If you look at the carefully selected wordings of public statements, you can often get a clue as to what they are actually avoiding to say, instead of just dismissing everything as "lies".

Just to give you an example from recent public discourse: When a big cloud service provider says something along the lines of: "we have not given the NSA direct access to our servers", they are probably speaking the truth. Assuming that, it suddenly tells us something about how the NSA actually has been spying; namely by intercepting the traffic between the servers, possibly on site. Otherwise, the company would probably have said "we have not given the NSA direct access to our data centres", or something similar. The key is what they are not saying, and what words they are using.

In this particular case, some obvious question would be: How many surfaces were manufactured? Are we talking about all of them, or a first (perhaps small) batch? How should we quantify "close" (to selling out)? With the correct interpretations to these questions, they are probably not lying.

Re:We can trust them

[symbolset]

Can you propose a more effective method than ridicule for changing undesired behavior? That would be helpful.

Re:We can trust them

[Anonymous Coward]

No WE CAN'T FORGET IT.

You go back to sleep if you want. If you work in a US tech company selling shit overseas, better get ready for job losses, sunshine.

Re:We can trust them

[sjames]

They use weasel words so they can maintain a thin pretense that they "didn't *actually* lie". That doesn't alter the fact that they most certainly did intend to have people believe something other than the truth (that is, they lie).

That their method of lying can provide useful hints of the truth doesn't alter that one little bit. They are still habitual liars.

Re:We can trust them

[Anonymous Coward]

You don't like freedom?

Re:We can trust them

[Frosty Piss]

Can you propose a more effective method than ridicule for changing undesired behavior?

In the case of Microsoft, apparently it is not and 'effective" method.

Re:We can trust them

[Alef]

Well, if you want to get into a discussion about semantics, maybe. My point is that you can trust them, after a fashion. And, consequently, that the notion that they are all just liars, so there is no point in listening to them, is flawed. Hence, the distinction is relevant.

Then we could of course discuss whether any deception is equally immoral, regardless of whether it is a technically truthful statement or not, but that would be to head off on a tangent, so I'm going to leave it at your comments and my own insinuations.

Re:We can trust them

[sjames]

No, I cannot trust them. Any truth I might derive from their utterances comes from assuming that their intent is to deceive and then to lie about the deception. That is not trust.

Not trusting them doesn't men I shouldn't evaluate what they have said in an attempt to get at a purely unintentional disclosure of truth. In lies, as in gifts, it's the thought that counts.

Re:We can trust them

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, right. Ridiculing people or companies on Slashdot is super effective. The truth is you're a Linux zealot. As such, there isn't much in your life along the lines of social interaction or entertainment besides trolling.

Re:We can trust them

[Alef]

Again, it depends on how you want to define trust. I trust (within reasonable bounds) that they will behave according to a certain morality -- a morality to which I may not agree with, but one that I know and understand.

My impression is that you prefer to define their behaviour as lies, in order to invoke the immorality commonly associated with lies. In a sense: if what they do is similar to and just as bad as lies, we should value them equally. And in that regard, I think you are missing my point. I am not making an argument about the ethics of their behaviour. And actually, I would contend that that question is independent of what terminology we choose in order to label it -- their actions remain the same regardless.

What I am saying is that it is relevant, from a pragmatic standpoint, to differentiate between (technically) truthful but deceptive statements, and blatant lies, irrespectively of which of them is more or less immoral. If you want to use other words to describe that, then by all means feel free to do so. Mixing them up, on the other hand, is, well, a bit deceptive...

Re:We can trust them

[Anonymous Coward]

In fact, it's the same person making this comment.

Re:We can trust them

[symbolset]

I'm just test driving it here. It seems to be working, so the next push is to make it a meme.

Re:We can trust them

[symbolset]

Your mistake here is thinking I am trying to alter the behavior of the company. We all know there is nothing we can do about that.

Re:We can trust them

[0123456]

Can we move on now

'Can we move on now' is the battle cry of the psychopath who's just been caught.

Re:We can trust them

[Anonymous Coward]

Blatant lies can be fodder for lawsuits. Mealy weasel-worded proclamations much less so, so they try to do enough "everyone knows what that means", or implucations, vernaculars, wtc., but get all pedantic English+philosophy major if they get called on it. Like Subway's (about a) Foot Long Sandwiches.

Captcha:misleads

Re:We can trust them

[sjames]

Blatant lies are also useful for analysis. They show you what the person wants you to believe. Figure out why they want you to believe that and you have your answers. They tell you where the sore spots are for the liar.

I prefer to call it lies because it is lies. It is lies within lies, in fact, since they have already built in a weak 'out' for when they get called on it. I prefer not to gloss over their unethical behavior. There is no morality driving their twisting of truth, they do it so they have just barely enough of an out to not get dragged in to court.

I prefer not to use sugar coated terms for it when it is clearly a lie. There are many kinds of lies. There are lies of omission, lies of mis-direction (both of those are the sort we're talking about here) as well as blatant lies (once known as damned lies). I prefer that terminology because it properly captures the intent of the speaker.

There are even reluctant lies. In the business world, if everyone around you has lied, simple self-preservation may require you to do the same. When everyone and his dog offers 'unlimited' access (with some rather severe limitations), if you don't call your service 'unlimited' as well, the public will see your offering as inferior even if it is several times more generous than the competitions'. Note that if more liars were plainly identified as liars, there would be less call for reluctant lies.

There can even be statements that are technically untrue (perhaps only in the most pedantic sense) that are not at all lies because practically everyone understands it as a figure of speech and is left with a correct understanding.

Capturing the intent matters because it differentiates those who are merely unclear speakers who may make misleading statements without ill intent. Those require a different analysis to get at the truth. There are also merely incorrect statements made by people who actually believe what they are saying. That is yet another analysis.

Corporate PR may be depended on to be a lie and we may further depend on it being pre-loaded with some technically true but decieving statement so that they may later lie about lying.

Re:We can trust them

[Anonymous Coward]

You can *predict* that they'll be have according to a certain 'morality'. That does not, in and of itself, indicate any *trust*.

Re:We can trust them

[bingoUV]

You need to know more about lying before teaching others about it. Try this

Delta agreed to buy a million units

[Anonymous Coward]

on the condition that their business allows them to hire 985,000 more pilots over the next year. Otherwise, the deal will be pro-rated, but meanwhile MS can recognize the revenue.

Technically correct

[microcars]

is the best kind of correct.

I know someone who has been sued many times over the years. Normal course of business this and that.
Told me he "never lost a lawsuit". That is because he settled all of them out of court for undisclosed sums.
So technically he is correct. He never lost a lawsuit.

Re:Technically correct

[Impy the Impiuos Imp]

In a similar fashion, most nerds on Slashdot have never been turned down by a beautiful woman.

Re:Technically correct

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah we settle them for undisclosed sums of money.

Re:Technically correct

[whisper_jeff]

Who is this guy? I'd like to get some out of court settlement funds.

TFA nails it

[Anonymous Coward]

From TFA: ... it instead turned out that initial stocks of the Surface Pro were paltry to say the least and it was 100% guaranteed to sell out – perhaps as part of Microsoft’s deliberate plan to build hype around the thing.

Which of course didn’t work – it wasn’t a great many months later we learned that overall sales were weak and un-shiftable inventory was massive.

This time around, Microsoft has again fallen short of offering any real explanation as to just how “close” to selling out the Surface 2 and Pro 2 really are – nor have they indicated how many were on hand to order in the first place. As such, it’s hard not to see the situation with the same raised eyebrows as before and wonder if it’s another game of smoke and mirrors.

If you really want to move Surface Tablets

[ALeader71]

Sell it for $300 and let me run Android on it. No fair refusing to open up your hardware information to the community. I dig the form factor, but I hate the OS.

Re:If you really want to move Surface Tablets

[Holi]

Close, it's 350

but no you will not be able to run android on it.

Easy...

[MikeDataLink]

They made three of them. Ballmer bought one, Gates bought one. The last one is sitting in Best Buy waiting for someone to buy it.

Re:Easy...

[geoskd]

They made three of them. Ballmer bought one, Gates bought one. The last one is sitting in Best Buy waiting for someone to buy it.

I've got ten bucks that says that thing is mine! I'm going down there right now to get it.

Who cares?

[Anonymous Coward]

Seriously, this is front-page material for Slashdot? MS says they have "nearly sold out" their Surface supply. What do any of us actually care? Why does anyone but MS managers care? Ooh, it's almost sold out now I want one. I didn't want one before but I gotta have everything that's almost sold out. Can't leave that last box of Corn Flakes on the shelf.

Re:Who cares?

[Anonymous Coward]

It's front page news, not because what it says, but what it doesn't. This is the first time *ever* I've heard a company go public and try to gain attention to the fact that they _almost_ sold out an item. They are actually telling us that their marketing ploy with a very *small* stock which they expected to rapidly deplete *didn't* work out. I.e, even though they plotted to understock, they ended up overstocking. Significant.

We sold three ... we are very close

[Anonymous Coward]

... to selling off the full inventory ..... once we sell the other 9,999,997 collecting dust in the warehouse.

really?

[Tom]

It's almos as if they were fishing for ridicule. Are you guys sure there isn't a whiteboard somewhere in MS marketing where they track the scores of who can make the most ridiculous statement and still be taken seriously by at least some media?

Re:really?

[JWSmythe]

Nah, they're doing just like they always do.

When they say "Windows 19 sold 14 trillion copies" before the release, what they really mean is that they sold most of the inventory from the manufacturer warehouse to vendors. For example...

BestBuy has something like 2,900 retail stores.
Walmart has about 10,130 stores.

That's 13,130 stores. At 100 units each, that's 1.3M units shipped. Every one of them was sold, as they've been sold to the stores. Not a single one is in the hands of a consumer yet.

They don't indicate the batch size. On the first edition, they had an overstock of 6M units, so we could assume the batch was about 8M. 1.3M shipped to the above two vendors. 0.7M to other vendors. 6M unsold, because the vendors never moved them all.

On this version, if they only produced 1M, they would be 0.3M under, creating this artificial lack of supply. If they can hype it up, and people buy out what's already been shipped to vendors, the vendors will order more. They could probably get 2M sold to consumers, from the perceived inability to get one.. Consumers are dumb. They'll say "oohh, they're almost sold out! I need to get one while I can!"

Re:really?

[RespekMyAthorati]

Consumers are dumb. They'll say "oohh, they're almost sold out! I need to get one while I can!"

That's what MS believes. I don't think it works anymore.

Re:really?

[geoskd]

Consumers are dumb. They'll say "oohh, they're almost sold out! I need to get one while I can!"

at those prices, consumers are a lot more discerning than MS thinks. That's why they fail almost every time they try. The upper limit of consumer stupidity is (in my experience) around $200-$300 USD. anything more than that is beyond the amount of money people are willing to spend on an impulse buy. People coughed up a ton for the iPhone because they needed a phone anyway, and could justify the higher price tag because the difference fell below that magic threshold. The iPad was something of an anomaly, and MS thought they could produce the same results as Apple, but MS does not have any of Apples glitter, and should in no way expect to be able to sell to the top of the market any time soon. Even Samsung isnt trying to sell product with the same margin as Apple because they have smart people in marketing who tell them that their products are not so well positioned that they can charge a premium for the name. MS marketing is either lying to management and telling them they can sell to a market segment they have no hope of penetrating, or management is ignoring their experts... Either way, MS is trying to sell to the highest margin segment of the market, but there is only one way to get into that segment: You get there first with exceptional products. Everyone else has to settle for eroding the margins.

Re:really?

[Kjella]

I think it's more about playing the stock market, it sounds so much better when you're sold out by slightly undersupplying the market even if it doesn't bring in more sales - perhaps even a bit less as people pick something else instead. "Almost sold out" sounds more like "we really wanted to give you the news that it was sold out but people bought fewer than our lowballed estimates so we're saying they almost sold out" at this point.

Re:really?

[JWSmythe]

    You're absolutely right. They have been attempting to break into the market since "Windows Pocket PC", "Windows CE", and "Windows XP Tablet PC Edition". The one thing they're failing to recognize is that consumers work on very strange rationale. That's how Microsoft really took over the consumer market to start. "oohh, it comes with this new buzzword "Microsoft".". Apple and Android currently own the small device market. Not long ago, Blackberry owned the phone portion, but their failure to keep up has left them dying. Now, I don't know anyone who uses a blackberry.

    It's the same in any market.. You can make the best widget at the lowest price, but if the consumers don't adopt it, it will die.

    They are setting a mediocre widget, at a high price, and despite all their efforts it will die.

Re:really?

[Andy_R]

Try adding the words "Potential Microsoft Surface" to the front of that sentence and it works a bit better...

Re:really?

[Tom]

Consumers aren't dumb. They are just individuals with limited resources up against a multi-billion dollar marketing machine (with a software department attached).

It's like going against an aircraft carrier battle group in a rubber boat with sticks.

Re:really?

[Anonymous Coward]

People still line up to buy untested products. People are dumber than you think.

Re:really?

[FireFury03]

Consumers are dumb. They'll say "oohh, they're almost sold out! I need to get one while I can!"

That's what MS believes. I don't think it works anymore.

I think it works with stuff that is already hyped and has a religious following (i.e. Apple saying "the new iPhone has sold out in the first day!" probably does increase demand). I'm pretty sure it won't increase demand where there was already none though - no one wants to be seen with an MS tablet, telling them that its sold out isn't going to make them want to be seen with one more...

Re:really?

[pr0fessor]

you should just buy one now before MS realizes that ARMs are small enough that they can just stamp windows rt into every screen made at the manufacture and not give you a choice.

Re:really?

[sapgau]

Well said. They are trying to reach Apple's sales without innovating (just waiting to see what works to copy it) and not worrying about the brand's reputation. If there is anything useful to learn from marketing is that they distinguish the value of a brand and can guesstimate their demand. For me the Microsoft brand sits at the same level as toothpaste or toilet paper, it sells a commodity that you need to fulfill a need.

Re:really?

[tingentleman]

Consumers are dumb. They'll say "oohh, they're almost sold out! I need to get one while I can!"

That's what MS believes. I don't think it works anymore.

In the UK it does. Look at housing.

They are nice devices!

[Anonymous Coward]

To be honest, they are really nice devices! The Surface 2 Pro goes up to 512 GB in storage (the first tablet that I could consider switching my desktop to!), and the hardware is pretty solid in most respects.

The teletubby user interface actually works for touch screens, that's what it was designed for. No problems there. The only real problem I have with the Surface 2 is the price. It's astronomical, especially as the storage size increases.

If Microsoft just could drop the price I would be very very interested in these devices. They are just selling Surface 1 for educational organisations for -45% price, and I'm seriously pissed off that I can't get one :(

My Car

[rjstanford]

My car is also almost sold out! In fact, its no longer on the market due to forecast internal demand. Wow! It must be amazing1111!!!!1!

translation

[sjames]

All our hard work has paid off! Those channels are more stuffed than ever before.We'll deal with the buyback clause quietly in a quarter or two.

Microsoft Kin

[bmo]

Remember the Kin?

I do.

You don't? Never seen one in the wild?

I've never seen one in the wild either, just like I haven't seen any kind of Surface (RT,Pro,Pro2) in the wild either. Sold out, eh? Sold out as in "pushed into the channel by threatening our customers over discounts for other things"?

The Kin is sitting in the landfill, on top of the concrete covering the pile of Lisas. It may soon have company.

--
BMO

Re:Microsoft Kin

[Anonymous Coward]

I've seen them in the Microsoft stores that are popping up in malls. You know, those stores that, when you walk past them, are completely empty?

Re:Microsoft Kin

[Anonymous Coward]

My wife had a Kin, back when we were dating. When it died, and she started using an old feature phone instead, I could suddenly understand what she was saying on the phone. Around that time, she became my fiance. Now we're married, and she has a Nexus 7.

Re:Microsoft Kin

[bitt3n]

Remember the Kin?

Microsoft missed a great marketing opportunity when, following the demise of the Kin, they failed to call their next mobile offering "The Next of Kin"

Re:Microsoft Kin

[Anonymous Coward]

Right next to the Atari E.T. game cartridges.

Re:Microsoft Kin

[steveha]

The Kin was a special case. Weird politics combined with stupid decisions caused it to be delayed a lot; it would have been a decent product had it shipped on time. Basically, if MS had let the "Danger" guys just do their thing... the previous Danger product, the Hiptop, was a big success.

http://www.engadget.com/2010/07/02/life-and-death-of-microsoft-kin-the-inside-story/

On the other hand, the MS tablet products prior to the iPad worked as designed, but the design wasn't all that great. They thought Windows compatibility was the most important thing, when actually battery life, thin and light hardware, and GUI user experience were all more important. The iPad was the first non-sucky tablet, and it didn't matter that you had to buy all-new apps for it.

Re:Microsoft Kin

[Anonymous Coward]

If you've never seen a surface in the wild, you should head over to your local university. I see on average 3 or 4 of them in each class. And my average class size is 12. The surface pros pen input is second to none. I'd get one personally except the price tag is higher than my budget allows. But if you're a college age kid with mommy and daddy footing the bill rather than a guy going back for his masters, it's real desirable.

Re:Microsoft Kin

[TrollstonButterbeans]

I saw one person with a Surface RT last year around launch time, I got to use it for about 5 minutes to check it out.

One year later, I haven't seen another one in the wild.

But I know a friend of a friend who says he knows this one guy who has one.

Re:Microsoft Kin

[Anonymous Coward]

and it is the same 3 or 4 people in each class, which are likely the only people on campus with one. It is not desirable. Nice try shill.

What would make it sell...

[__aaltlg1547]

There are some features they should really consider adding that would make it blow away an iPad for utility:

• USB host port -- Yes, a HOST port. Sure would be nice to attach a mouse or printer if you want. OH WAIT, they did. It's a full size USB 3.0 port.
• SD card slot -- OH WAIT! It has that too. It's a micro-SD and a full size would be nicer, but still: removable storage.
• Video out port -- OH WAIT! It has THAT too. Damn. You need to buy an adapter to convert it to a standard HDMI connector. No idea why they didn't go with a HDMI micro port. They really should have, since that's a common standard.

   

Re:What would make it sell...

[Anonymous Coward]

omg, did you just copy the currently-running ipad vs surface television commercials?

Re:What would make it sell...

[Dracos]

• Apps.

Maybe. This is MS after all; outside of XBox, they have absolutely no clue how to market to consumers.

Re:What would make it sell...

[Arker]

How well documented is the hardware?

If Microsoft builds enough they might wind up going real cheap here in another year or two. If there are free drivers the things might be worth picking up then.

Re:What would make it sell...

[RespekMyAthorati]

All of which are available in a ASUS tablet, at a much lower price.

Re:What would make it sell...

[skeib]

Well, it looks like the market has spoken on these things. I've never heard an ipad user complain over the loss of any of those things. External storage is a mess because it makes you have to expose the file system to the user. Bluetooth and wifi beats USB host mode any day, and all tablets have hdmi out, so that's not really an advantage for the Surface.

The surface has nice hardware, a decent OS (apart from the desktop mode, which really does not work in full HD with touch), and a totally worthless ecosystem.

Re:What would make it sell...

[Holi]

Which is the reason Microsoft is making the Surface in the first place. Do you really think they care if they lose a billion dollars on the hardware if it increases demand for windows 8 devices?

Re:What would make it sell...

[ericloewe]

DisplayPort is better than HDMI, and in practice mini DisplayPort to HDMI adapter are only slightly more expensive than micro HDMI to HDMI.

Re:What would make it sell...

[ericloewe]

Surface 2 - your typical mess of binaries for this and that characteristic of ARM.
Surface Pro 2 - typical ultrabook hardware, so it should be relatively well supprted.

Re:What would make it sell...

[Morpeth]

Don't confuse the iZombies and MS knee-jerk haters with facts or information... they don't like that. Seriously I wish CmdrTaco was still here, there used to be some editorial objectivity back in the day. Now it's just 'post any MS article for automatic mod ups' .

Re:What would make it sell...

[ericloewe]

Since when is exposing the filesystem to the user a negative?

You must be kidding if you're trying to push Wi-Fi and Bluetooth over USB. Let me just grab my Wi-Fi pen drive! Or my Bluetooth HDD!

Since what you are saying in your first paragraph is completely absurd, I conclude that you have no idea what you're talking about.

Re:What would make it sell...

[TechyImmigrant]

>All of which are available in a ASUS tablet, at a much lower price.

This. The 'second tier' manufacturers are making the same hardware with the same silicon for a lower price with sane interfaces and you can run your choice of OS on them.

Re:What would make it sell...

[__aaltlg1547]

Yeah, Apple users don't complain because iPad is all about media consumption. They have a browser and game device they can hold in their hands and that's all they really want. Inside it's a computer but making it work however the user wants is not on Apple's business plan.

My wife has an iPad and has complained about her inability to make it drive a printer. I have not been able to use it to get pictures from my digital camera without using another computer. I can stick an SDCard from the camera directly in any of my other computers, including my cell phone, or I can connect a cable and suck the files out because they have USB host ports. Using the iPad I have found that I don't have the pointing precision I have with a mouse. I need another appliance to get it to drive my TV screen or a projector. I own one but it's not the size and shape that I want to carry it with me where I would be likely to use an iPad or Surface.

Surface is a tablet computer. iPad is a pretty toy. That's the difference.

Re:What would make it sell...

[H0p313ss]

DisplayPort is better than HDMI, and in practice mini DisplayPort to HDMI adapter are only slightly more expensive than micro HDMI to HDMI.

Absolutely, I've got 2550x1440 monitors using display port, try doing that with HDMI

Re:What would make it sell...

[MrEdofCourse]

Well, as you pointed out, it has that and it hasn't been selling.

For me those things don't really matter...

USB - I can print just fine with AirPrint. Mouse... I vaguely remember seeing one of those last decade.

SD card slot - There's an adapter, but why bother when I can just use WiFi hard drives and WiFi SD cards?

Video out port. As long as I'm buying an adapter, what's the difference in buying an adapter for the iPad versus another for the Surface? I've rarely used mine since AirPlay is much easier.

What would make the Surface RT sell is a time machine so they could go back in time before iOS and Android came to dominate the market.

The RT version is dead, and Microsoft should give up on it as all of the Windows RT partners have.

Re:What would make it sell...

[spire3661]

Did you SEE Xbox One's debut debacle? They dont get consumers at all.

Re:What would make it sell...

[spire3661]

'better' is subjective. HDMI's ubiquity cant be ignored.

Re: What would make it sell...

[Anonymous Coward]

It's negative cause normal people are confused and not comfortable with it. Exposing the file system can create havoc and increase support request. It's also not necessary. Why should I care where a file is stored as long as I can use and edit it.

Remember : most people are NOT geeks.

Re: What would make it sell...

[Anonymous Coward]

The iPad is not a toy. You are trying to use it like a Windows laptop. But it works different. You can print with ease with AirPrint. Sorry no centronics port. Transferring photos is very easy via photostream for example. Or airdrop. I have no idea why you think you need a USB stick.
Connecting to a TV is extremely easy via the AppleTV.

In a nutshell : you are using it wrong.

Re:What would make it sell...

[gl4ss]

yeah so let me hook up my arduino to the surface rt.
whaaat? I can't? I can't run sw for it, install my drivers?

the usb host is less functional than on most android phones because of the intentional functionality limitation policy from MS regarding RT - because they hoped rt would work as their way to get people to getting software from the ms sw market and only from there.

the pro isn't half bad but the rt.. is shit. it's so shit that one can't even recommend the surface out of fear that whoever hears that recommendation goes and buys the rt version...

Re:What would make it sell...

[ericloewe]

DisplayPort supports 1440x2560 @ 60Hz - HDMI does not.

Since you need an adapter in either case (micro HDMI or mini DisplayPort) and mini DisplayPort -> HDMI adapters are only slightly more expensive than micro HDMI -> HDMI adapters, I don't think ubiquity plays that much of a role.

Re:What would make it sell...

[sapgau]

I call BS on that. Exposing external file storage to generations prior to the menials "might" confuse them but it's perfectly reasonable to think that I can TRANSFER my file (movie, document, picture) THROUGH my external device such as an SD card or USB to another device to read it.

Re: What would make it sell...

[sapgau]

I bet you AC that Apple will include an SD or USB port in their next wave of new products.

Re:What would make it sell...

[Anonymous Coward]

Why the fuck would you want a mouse attached to a tablet?

Printers? networkes printers are the norm, not USB printers. Did you just wake up after falling asleep in 1999?

With a wifi connection you have all the storage you need available.

Video out? Why? You think that POS surface is going to be able to power anything larger than a 14" screen?

The one constant with MS shills is that they are all stupid.

Re:What would make it sell...

[vilanye]

It is not just the consumer market, it is the developers also that are rejecting it. And these are development houses that drink strictly from the MS firehose.

Relationship to Microsoft's University Propoganda

[jfz]

Microsoft is so desperate to get people to supply apps for their platforms, that they are sending Marketers to University students which try to convince them to learn .NET and write software for their tablets through fake workshops and "student sponsored" events. "Learn .Net, get a job!", etc.

This got me thinking about how much money, waste, and energy is being pumped into maintaining this vertical integration with developers. Irregardless, the sheer destructiveness of this "funneling" of young minds into closed technology tracks must be a huge hidden cost on society.

Microsoft Stats

[Mondor]

Microsoft is well known for juggling with stats. As an example - their stats of Windows Phone popularity in UK.

Here is an oversimplified example: There are 100 devices on the market, 70% are mine, 5% are yours. I sell 60, he sells 30, you sell 20. What is your market share now? 11.9%. There is no word about the cap that market has for your devices.

So, while you are selling less than anyone, your market share grew twice for the period, bigger than of anyone else (perhaps because for Android such growth would mean gaining 140% of the market share).

The point is - if you produce 10 tablets and sell 9, then perhaps you sell more tablets that Apple, if counted in percents. But your stats are miserable when counted in real units. Microsoft relies on percents more and more over the years, refusing to provide real numbers, and I can't help but to conclude that they are trying to play big, while being in trouble.

Why not wait for them to go on sale

[Anonymous Coward]

then we might see the actual figures.
Then we can compare it to the initial sales of other competing devices.
Perhaps then we can see how they compare to the likes of the iPad etc.

Personally, for them to be saying 'sold out' this far ahead of the release then I have to wonder how many that have actally odered. Methinks it is a whole lot less than Apple will sell when they release an upgrade to the iPad.

Re:Nice...

[jaredm1]

I too had felt the same way, Java & .NET both seem like more modern development tools that free the developer from having to think about memory management and instead focus on what they want to create. Having recently been using Objective-C my perspective has changed quite a bit. I have some background in C & assembly so the concept of managing memory is not entirely foreign. I am finding the Cocoa APIs to be very clean and nice to use. Managing memory is also not as painful an experience as I recall from my C days. Objective-C apps should be more efficient (which really matters on battery-powered devices where processor usage is still important) and indeed it is. I believe it is one of the reasons Android and its apps still lag even when compared to older, less powerful Nokia phones.

25

[Anonymous Coward]

They had 25 units to sell, 11 still in stock.

Almost sold as in...

[mysidia]

• Early demand more accurately estimated this time --- few units produced, therefore, the few that sold of the first batch, are almost all of them; OR: bulk of units artificially delayed for second shipment in order to increase the chance of a sellout
• A small number of units were labelled "Surface2"; the rest of the batch is labelled "Surface 2" [Revision B]; When we say 'almost sold out' "we're not including the Revision B units, just the Surface2 [base]"
• A deal with a 3rd party is negotiated to buy almost all units that are available, with a variable delivery schedule, and retail customers given priority (the 3rd party company having to wait until next shipment on units that they were superceded on) ----- therefore, all or nearly all the units are "sold"; when a customer walks into the store and wants to buy one, they'll take delivery priority over the 3rd party company though, and get assigned that unit instead.

Same old, same old

[Anonymous Coward]

And now, given the latest stats showing the iPhone 5s leapfrogged to Numero Uno, next thing we'll see is how all the wonderful MS Nokia phones featuring Win8 are a cat's hair away from selling out too. And how they can make an exception and help you out getting yours if you CALL WITHIN THE NEXT 5 MINUTES. Operators standing by waiting your call...

Re:Nice...

[Anonymous Coward]

"And yes I want garbage collection and namespaces because I want to be productive, thank you."

Why not get a colostomy bag plumbed in permanently on your meat-android body as well. Would that not make you similarly more productive?

The preorder batch is almost sold out!

[Anonymous Coward]

And that means what exactly? if a product is truly popular, we'll see more than a pre-order batch made, so there will be more... are there more manufacturing runs of the surface 2 / pro planned? if it was *SOOOO* popular, MS would be hot to produce more... and I'm not seeing any announcements like that yet.
Is this Microsoft's way of saying that they might actually sell all the units they produced for the preorders? why would anyone care? it would be something else to hear "demand is great enough that we're producing additional batches"... but "we're almost sold out (of the preoder batch)" is just not impressive...

Re:Nice...

[ArcadeNut]

Guys, guys... lets talk about something we can all agree on like Abortion or Religion... we know everyone here isn't going to agree on which language is best...

Re:Nice...

[Joce640k]

I use C++ and I never think about memory management.

Once every six months or so the memory checker will beep at me. It's always a trivial fix.

The best part is: I know that files aren't staying open outside their scope, etc.

I need a MS article filter

[Morpeth]

because every time anything is posted about MS, it's just an echo chamber here, umpteen useless uninformative posts about how evil, bad, etc MS is (and usually how awesome Apple is). I don't even know why /. bothers to post any MS articles, the comments are the exact same every time -- pointless with no value.

Re:I need a MS article filter

[Anonymous Coward]

Gotta match the product.

Re:I need a MS article filter

[Anonymous Coward]

because every time anything is posted about MS, it's just an echo chamber here, umpteen useless uninformative posts about how evil, bad, etc MS is (and usually how awesome Apple is).

Positive comments about apple? Links or it didn't happen.

Re: I need a MS article filter

[Anonymous Coward]

Probably because MS IS EVIL.
Have you seriously forgotten all the shenanigans they did? Starting with the deceit of IBM and the Canadian company the bought QDOS from (to simply rename it MSDOS), anti-competitive nonsense (DRDOS, competing office products, etc), incl. planned incompatibilities, the browser wars ending in a billion dollar fine by the EU, the Linux FUD campaign, etc.

The unethical negative record (within the tech world) is only surpassed by Samsung.

Re:I need a MS article filter

[Anonymous Coward]

What kind of discussion did you expect from the summary? Someone defending Microsoft's honor?

Re:I need a MS article filter

[TheSkepticalOptimist]

Welcome to Slashdot, I see this is your first time viewing this website given your incredulity over how Microsoft is perceived poorly here.

Re: I need a MS article filter

[TheSkepticalOptimist]

Correction, Microsoft WAS evil.

Microsoft no longer has the market influence to be evil.

I mean you can quote history and claim to still be pissed off about something that happened 30 years ago but is no longer relevant today, or you can move on with your life.

There are significantly more evil companies that actually have market influence and relevance today that have corrupted a new generation of Luddites in ways worse the Microsoft could even imagine.

could someone tell me exactly what...

[Anonymous Coward]

a 'Surface' is? i have yet to see one in the wild, in a store, on a table, at a kiosk, in a Radio Shack, etc...

Re:could someone tell me exactly what...

[Anonymous Coward]

I've seen some at Microsoft events. The first ones. Terribly slow tablets, if you ask me. I mean - it's not even close to Nexus 7. Guys were trying to use them to take notes, and I felt sorry for them.

Re:could someone tell me exactly what...

[romanr]

Not sure - I've never seen one either, but according to the TV commercials I've seen, they go click, click, click a lot.

Re:Nice...

[91degrees]

C# runs on Linux and Mac via Mono.

But really, who cares about it only running on MS systems? If I write software for MS systems then that's the system I want it to run on.

When your boss sees growth in non-M$ systems

[tepples]

But really, who cares about it only running on MS systems? If I write software for MS systems then that's the system I want it to run on.

Unless your software costs more than a computer, your software runs on the system that users have. And when your boss sees growth in non-Microsoft systems, your boss will want you to figure out how to make an application available on non-Microsoft systems. For example, a video game studio might choose to diversify into PS4 and SteamOS in case the rumors that Xbox One will become Xbomb One turn out true. Or you might see a lot of hits to your app's web site but low conversion rates, check the logs to find out why, and discover that your download page has turned away users of Macs and Android and iOS devices.

Re:When your boss sees growth in non-M$ systems

[91degrees]

Unless your software costs more than a computer, your software runs on the system that users have.

Most software does cost more than the computer.

And when your boss sees growth in non-Microsoft systems, your boss will want you to figure out how to make an application available on non-Microsoft systems. For example, a video game studio might choose to diversify into PS4 and SteamOS in case the rumors that Xbox One will become Xbomb One turn out true.

If that's possible then you use a lnguage that's well supported on other platforms. Whatever the case you use the language that's the best fit for your problem. It's pointless dismissing a language based on not having a feature that you're never going to use. Even then, portability is only one aspect. I'm not going to write an Android app entirely in C just to make porting to iPhone easier. I'd be losing too much of the Android system that pretty much depends on Java.

Re:When your boss sees growth in non-M$ systems

[tepples]

If that's possible then you use a lnguage that's well supported on other platforms.

So what should one do when there exists no language that all relevant platforms support well? One could invent a new language and implement a compiler for it that emits code in each platform's preferred language. Or one could compile an existing language into a supported language, such as with the C-to-JavaScript compiler Emscripten. But would you find that that practical?

Even then, portability is only one aspect. I'm not going to write an Android app entirely in C just to make porting to iPhone easier. I'd be losing too much of the Android system that pretty much depends on Java.

So how do you prove that the application logic (not the UI logic) of an Objective-C application for OS X or iOS behaves identically to the application logic of a Java application for Android? For example, to allow cross-platform play of a multi-platform video game, the behavior of the game's physics on all platforms must match, or the games will fall out of sync.

Re:When your boss sees growth in non-M$ systems

[91degrees]

So what should one do when there exists no language that all relevant platforms support well?

I guess I'd consider the effort required to support multiple languages across multiple platforms and consider whether the return was worth the extra work. What would you do?

So how do you prove that the application logic (not the UI logic) of an Objective-C application for OS X or iOS behaves identically to the application logic of a Java application for Android?

If that's important, you use C or C++. The point is it's an engineering choice.

Although you can't even prove identical behaviour across two different architectures reliably in the same language. For example;

int x = -7 % 6

This depends on whether the implementation rounds down or rounds towards zero, and what the sign rules are with the % operator. And if you're using floating point, you'll come up with new and intersting errors. The 387 uses 80 bit internal precision. Most architectures use 64 bit.

Re:When your boss sees growth in non-M$ systems

[tepples]

I guess I'd consider the effort required to support multiple languages across multiple platforms and consider whether the return was worth the extra work. What would you do?

With the entry barriers and platform fragmentation that exist in several areas of the software market, I imagine that a lot of smaller shops not big enough to be able to afford to hire specialists in multiple platforms will have to disappoint users of at least one major platform with a notice "We are seeking a publisher to bring (name of product) to (name of platform)."

Proprietary RF

[tepples]

Bluetooth and wifi beats USB host mode any day

Provided your other devices support Bluetooth and Wi-Fi. A lot of digital cameras, for example, don't support Wi-Fi, and Microsoft's own game controllers use proprietary RF instead of standard Bluetooth. Besides, some Bluetooth input devices need to be connected through USB to pair before they can be used on Bluetooth.

The surface has [...] a totally worthless ecosystem.

Here's one way Microsoft has made the RT ecosystem worthless: Has Microsoft ported Visual Studio to RT or even left enough hooks in the OS for a third party to port any IDE? You can run AIDE on Android.

Money, dear boy

[tepples]

I don't even know why /. bothers to post any MS articles, the comments are the exact same every time -- pointless with no value.

It brings in ad clicks.

Shipped vs Sold Out

[pubwvj]

The one shipped out was returned. That was all they made. This is a bit different than Apple who counts actual sales to end users... 9,000,000 iPhone's sold in the first weekend. But not sold out. They're still making more for next week.

Re:Nice...

[MightyMartian]

Just to make it clear here, for any kind of non-trivial compatibility between Windows and *nix, Mono might as well not exist at all. Trying to assert that Mono offers anywhere near the portability one finds with Java is pure bullshit. And if I'm faced with having to put a helluva lot of work into porting between Windows and various *nixes, well why the fuck wouldn't I just use C/C++, with something like four decades of libraries and know-how behind it?

For all intents and purposes, C# is a Windows language, that treacherous little worm de Icaza's work aside. It may very well be the whiz bang bestest programming language and .NET may be the finest runtime environment, but they are utterly fucking irrelevant if you're planning on developing cross platform apps, and thus, it's safe to say, in this modern world, they don't mean rat fucking shit.

And really, apart from some neat syntactical innovations, C# is not the be-all and end-all of C-like languages, so for me it doesn't even enter consideration when I'm looking at a language for a project. The day and age when I wanted to limit myself to one platform is long long gone.

Re:Nice...

[bmo]

Mono is dead. It's been dead for years.

Really, it is. There isn't a single application worth using on Linux (where mono was meant to be used) that uses Mono. And there won't be. Because Mono is Microsoft Technology, and Microsoft has threatened, in the press, that Linux violates 235 MS patents (which they refuse to enumerate).

So despite the "community promise" that Microsoft published (thus giving Mono developers the protection of estoppel), there aren't any Mono devs left, except maybe Miguel himself.

Microsoft stuff is just plain toxic.

--
BMO

I think that's a typo

[Simon Rowe]

They meant to say "Nearly sold ONE".

I Know Someone Who Bought Them For a Small School!

[mpapet]

They have a double-digit purchase of the devices and it will be no surprise that the Microsoft people gave them a GREAT deal per unit.

I don't know a whole lot about tablets nor do I care but I test drove one for a while. My nearest experience comparison is with the Android/Play marketplace. If you are an Android user, the interface doesn't have any surprises.

What's hilarious is the almost empty "marketplace." The only thing in it were apps written by the few companies Microsoft hasn't managed to crush or alienate. Of the few apps in the marketplace, imagine single-digit reviews being a heavily reviewed/downloaded application.

The buyer was promised special "support" because so many (double digits!!!!) were bought, but that was an epic waste of the buyer's time. Eventually someone determined to use the thing found someone at Microsoft that knew something about the devices. It wasn't in support, that's for sure. There are apparently a large number of undocumented features essentially paving the way for an "enterprise tablet" inside the Microsoft ActiveDirectory/groupware-whatever jail.

I've got a negative bias because I don't "get" tablets. Me, personally, it's not even close to the Android ecosystem and the blinky tiles do nothing for me. Judging by how many tiny promises were broken and time wasted for the buyer and almost empty marketplace the device is doomed. Microsoft could keep it going though just to say they've got a tablet.

Almost sold out

[Anonymous Coward]

Its true, after the beating they took on Surface 1 this time they only made 50 units.

a clear statement

[Anonymous Coward]

37 produced.
28 sold.
5 more in shopping carts...
= nearly sold out!

a clear statement

[mexsudo]

37 produced. 28 sold. 5 more in shopping carts... = nearly sold out!

It sounds like you want a computer

[clay_shooter]

I've never needed any of those ports on my tablet...

Sold out AGAIN?

[Anonymous Coward]

What, all 3 of them? Well congrats.

MSFT also said Vista was a success

[media-dude]

"Microsoft Makes Another "Nearly Sold Out" Claim For the Surface Line"

Microsoft also said Vista was a success....

Perception problems

[enter to exit]

They need to state how many were up for sale to begin with and if "sold out" means sold to retail stores or people for this to mean anything.

Having said that, there is nothing particularly wrong (in a technical sense) with the surface devices other than people don't seem to want them.

I like the metro interface for a tablet, it's a good idea. There's the problem of apps though, people with Android/iOS specific apps simply won't/can't migrate, all MS can do is push devs to port the top 100 apps people use and hope to win by attrition. MS Office/Outlook and all the MS Enterprise services compatibility on a tablet is a big hook for a lot of people too..

They are a little expensive for the underdog product. They need to sell these devices at close to cost, flood the market and then slowly hike up the prices once they've killed off competition with lock-ins. There was a time when MS would do this instinctively.

Re:Nice...

[dbIII]

Just to make it clear here, for any kind of non-trivial compatibility between Windows and *nix, Mono might as well not exist at all. Trying to assert that Mono offers anywhere near the portability one finds with Java is pure bullshit

While that is true there is some software that runs on it and is tested against it, just as their is some software that is developed with Wine in mind. For me that solves a "hotseat" problem with a single licence by putting the infrequently used software on a *nix machine then whoever wants to use it gets to it via X from their own desktop.
Since the developers made an effort for it to work in such an environment it's likely that they would have used java or similar if they had a choice to avoid the pain of working out which bits of dotnet (stupid name you can't even use in a sentence) would work in mono and which would not. Either way I'm left with a single threaded solution to a embarrassingly parallel problem and seven cores sitting there doing nothing while users wait for up to twenty minutes - I don't know if it's dotnets fault or monos fault. In 1995 that would be annoying to have expensive geophysical software that only runs in one thread, in 2005 you'd be pointing at dual CPU desktop machines as an example of why it's not good enough and it's time to try harder, in 2013 it's a situation of WTF? If it can't handle multiple threads well today what use is it outside of embedded space?

Dump the wonky RT and ARM stuff

[dicobalt]

Stick a BayTrail in there with a real (aka x86) version of Windows.

Re:Dump the wonky RT and ARM stuff

[wmac1]

I would buy the surface 2 (the ARM version) if it was a Baytrail atom.

I am not interested in the pro (I have a PC for that) but I need a decent Baytrail tablet and Surface 2 could be it.

Apple's was not well received either

[SuperKendall]

They are still bitter that they had the idea for a tablet long before Apple

Sure but that idea was a touchscreen desktop computer.

When Apple did it, everyone pissed themselves like excited dogs

When Apple announced the iPad there were a TON of pundits who said it was stupid and would never sell, lots saying it was a much worse platform than the Microsoft tablets...

But on shipping them people found they liked how it worked, and sales took off from there.

Kind of sad, really. Apple continues to gain marketshare and is making more money with it's 1 out of 8 people using Apple products than Microsoft is with 7 out of 8 using their OS.

Apple is making more money but still not a lot more than Microsoft, which still has huge revenues. But you have a good point that they are basically been perceived as losing for a while and they have to have been pretty inept to manage that when they could have had the phone and tablet market from the outset if they had done things right.

But I do not think it was possible for a company run by someone like Gates (and later Balmer) to ever really do things right. They just don't understand what right really is and so they wouldn't know how to ship it if they had it.

FIRST!

[Anonymous Coward]

I actually saw an actual normal human with a Surface the other day.

Yeah, this shouldn't be notable, but think back to just how fast iPads showed up in people's hands when they were launched. I live in a very tech-heavy area of the East Coast, and only now have I seen EVEN ONE Surface. I've seen more HP Touchpads around here than Surfaces.

Oh, you guys...

[Anonymous Coward]

Oh, you guys don't understand Microsoft! You think Microsoft is a mediocre software and hardware company. That's a mistake. Microsoft is one of the best of what it does: Evil.

And lies, of course, evil and lies.

And manipulation. Evil, lies, and manipulation.

I forgot incompetence. Evil, lies, manipulation, and incompetence. Very good at incompetence.

Then there is releasing unfinished products.

Evil, lies, manipulation, incompetence, and releasing unfinished products. Experts at all those things.

My opinion, shared by many others.

Re:Oh, you guys...

[David Gerard]

CUPERTINO, Transylvania, Friday — After bricking unlocked iPhones, kicking applications off the iPhone store that might even slightly compete with iTunes in the far future and filing a wave of patents on basic well-known computer science, Apple Inc. today filed a Form 8-K with the Securities and Exchange Commission declaring that it was openly adopting Evil as a corporate policy.

"Fuck it," said Zombie Steve Jobs to an audience of soul-mortgaged thralls, "we're evil. But our stuff is sooo good. You'll keep taking our abuse. You love it, you worm. Because our stuff is great. It's shiny and it's pretty and it's cool and it works. It's not like you'll go back to a Windows phone. Ha! Ha!"

Steve Ballmer of Microsoft was incensed at the news. "Our evil is better than anyone's evil! No-one sweats the details of evil like Microsoft! Where's your antitrust trial, you polo-necked bozo? We've worked hard on our evil! Our Zune's as evil as an iPod any day! I won't let my kids use a lesser evil! We're going to do an ad about that! I'll be in it! With Jerry Seinfeld! Beat that! Asshole.”

"Of course, we're still not evil," said Sergey Brin of Google. "You can trust us on this. Every bit of data about you, your life and the house you live in is strictly a secret between you and our marketing department. But, hypothetically, if we were evil, it's not like you're going to use Windows Live Search. Ha! Ha! I'm sorry, that's my ‘spreading good cheer' laugh. Really."

 

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Re:Oh, you guys...

[vilanye]

Microsoft is evil, but they can't compete in the Evilympics against Monsanto, BofA, Bechtel, Goldman Sachs, Walmart, De Beers,etc.

Sure Microsoft has cost businesses and consumers billions due to their willful incompetence and set computing back a few decades, but I don't think MS can match the destruction that these other companies have wrought.

Perhaps Metro should be called Wolf ?

[Anonymous Coward]

When in doubt.. barking mammals.. well.. bark

Psssst!

[Zaldarr]

Just between you and me, your sig is incorrectly attributed. I normally wouldn't be so petty but I'm reading Plato as I type this for my essay. http://plato-dialogues.org/faq/faq008.htm

Re:Nice...

[Anonymous Coward]

If you don't need to directly manage memory, you'd probably do better if you moved to a higher-level language. There's little different between libraries handling a lot of things for you and a language handling the same things for you, except the language version lets you type less and shows you more warnings and errors.

Re:I Know Someone Who Bought Them For a Small Scho

[FireFury03]

They have a double-digit purchase of the devices and it will be no surprise that the Microsoft people gave them a GREAT deal per unit.

Last I heard, Windows RT devices were going into schools at £150 a pop including Office. That's a pretty good deal - so good that I struggle to believe that MS aren't making a loss on each one. However, that's how MS have always worked with educational discounts - sell their stuff into schools and universities at rock bottom prices so that none of the competition can move into that market. That way they (hope to) get all the kids hooked on their software and carry that out into the real world. It certainly used to work well... I suspect it doesn't work quite so well these days since the kids often have non-MS kit at home now.

FWIW, for the schools only seem to be interested in iPads and Surface - Android doesn't get a look in (possibly because they are either going for "prestige" (iPad) or price (MS's unbeatable education deal)).

Not surprised

[CarolynHile]

If they're making 500 of those surface tablets, then no wonder they're nearly sold out. Sorry, but 1,000 is pushing it.

The article answers the question

[David Gerard]

"both units are already in short supply" - they made two, and sold one.

Lol

[TheSkepticalOptimist]

Make 4, sell 4, claim you are a hit!

I will agree that perhaps Microsoft could be diligent and keep releasing the same thing and it will eventually sell. I mean you have to realize that in spite of Windows gaining nearly 95% PC market back in the day, Microsoft never had rapid adoption of new versions of their OS. I mean how many people say "I'll wait for the service pack" when deciding when to update to a new version of Windows, and a significant portion of people have never upgraded past Windows XP.

The same kind of sentimentality could happen with Microsoft's hardware. Don't buy version 1 of a product, wait for them to work out their quirks and then buy version 2 or 3. Perhaps we are starting to see this trend with Surface. Certainly early adopters of Xbox360 and Zune paid the price of not waiting.

Realize that Microsoft still has a significant market of corporate users. These corporate users are still clamoring to have a GOOD Windows tablet that works seamlessly with Microsoft's infrastructure. You can berate Microsoft all you want and claim Linux is superior or other Slashdot ingratiating FUD, but the reality is corporations run on Microsoft, period. If Microsoft can find a tablet to hook into the corporate market, it will be a huge win. Whether that trickles over into the consumer markets will yet to be seen, but you can be sure some CEO using a Windows tablet at work all day long is not going to come home to an iPad.

But, Microsoft hasn't figure out the magic yet that will get the corporate crowd to flock to Surface. Certainly my foray into this territory leaves a lot to be desired for when I was handed a Surface Pro to develop for. A Tablet/PC hybrid doesn't work well in either situation, using touch on a standard Windows desktop is useless, and Microsoft's attempt to force Metro on the desktop user base was equally ill conceived. My Surface Pro sits in a box in a drawer in my desk and I only pull it out to test software on once in a while. I don't see anything about Surface Pro 2 that will make me change that.

While these faults may have sealed the company's fate, I won't rule them out just yet. Perhaps all they need to do is to keep the Surface brand alive till Version 3, which seems to be their magic number in terms of when a product finally takes off.

Total inventor : 1

[Anonymous Coward]

What I read was they was just one available. The sales team has cornered a homeless guy and they are begging and pressuring the homeless guy to buy it(MS will provide the funding). The homeless guy has said, he is leaning towards buying it, hence the "Almost sold out" message MS is broadcasting.

Misquote!

[Dabido]

They actually said, 'Close to selling one.' Someone made noises like they were interested.

Sorry everyone.

[Anonymous Coward]

I bought 12 of the 15.

I thought it would be funny.

Oh you know

[Anonymous Coward]

As in 'selling out' or in other words ditching the Surface because it's worth fuck all.

Re:Nice...

[Anonymous Coward]

As a MSFT investor and C# developer

So much fail stuffed into so few words...

Re:Nice...

[Anonymous Coward]

mono supports a subset of C# and it a completely dogshit environment.

There is not a single non-trivial app for mono used widely. Not one.

That is fail.

Evilympics contender

[Anonymous Coward]

The U.S. government has killed or caused the death of an estimated 11,000,000 people since the end of the 2nd World War.

The U.S. government allows Monsanto, BofA, Bechtel, Goldman Sachs, and Walmart to do their evil, so rich people can make more money.