Slashdot Mirror
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."
Metro interfece is nice, but useless without software.
Nearly sold out! But the 1 was sold to Ballmer, as an expensive coaster.
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.
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".
Slashdot social media options: AIM, ICQ, Yahoo, Jabber and Mobile Text. Why no MySpace?
We keep repeating it because other morons keep forgetting it.
Good-bye
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.
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.
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.
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.
That's what MS believes. I don't think it works anymore.
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...
Visit the Arcade Restoration Workshop @ http://www.arcaderestoration.com
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.
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.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
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...
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.
http://www.maxineudall.com/2010/02/should-economists-be-sued-for-malpractice.html
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.
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
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."
Get daily email alerts of new NewsTechnica!
http://rocknerd.co.uk
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.