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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."
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!"
Serious? Seriousness is well above my pay grade.
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.
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.
Have a nice time.
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.
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.