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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."
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? :\
#fuckbeta #iamslashdot #dicemustdie
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.
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BMO
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.
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.
The preceding comment is my own, and in no way construes an opinon of the Emperor of Mankind.
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.
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.
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.
http://spamdecoy.net - free throwaway anonymous email - avoid spam!
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.
Schroedinger's Brexit: The UK is both in and out of the EU at the same time!
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.
http://blog.nexusuk.org