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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
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.
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.