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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."
Metro interfece is nice, but useless without software.
Microsoft interfeces? Sounds like shitty interfaces to me!
Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities. - Voltaire
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
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.
You're special forces then? That's great! I just love your olympics!
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.
I'm not sure, but the end of the line must be coming soon.
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.
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.
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...
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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.
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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.
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.