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Microsoft's Surface Revenue Drops By $285M (26%) (computerworld.com)
An anonymous reader quotes Computerworld:
Revenue generated by Microsoft's Surface hardware during the March quarter was down 26% from the same period the year before, the company said yesterday as it briefed Wall Street. For the quarter, Surface produced $831 million, some $285 million less than the March quarter of 2016, for the largest year-over-year dollar decline ever... The revenue decline "indicates that the aging product needs a refresh badly," Jack Gold, principal analyst at J. Gold Associates, wrote in a note to clients today. "Price cutting and competing vendors' products will continue to create declines until new product is released, rumored for later this year." Microsoft threw cold water on any significant changes to the Surface line before June, forecasting that the current quarter will also post a revenue decline.
Its the classical "why upgrade if this one works fine"?
Microsoft did come out with a fine product this time (I run Linux on mine though).
Microsoft has to pull an Apple (make either attractive gimmicks or real hardware improvements) to get people to upgrade.
I just wish Windows wasn't a System-As-A-Service Cloud-Shit OS, I'd be happy to pay extra $100 ( or even $400) and get Windows no strings attached.
Fuck the Cloud business models.
Someone is making a mountain out of a mole hill.
Not likely. We tried the Surface Pro at work. Its performance was so bad, its interoperability with Microsoft's own software so poor, its concept so poorly thought out that our management, largely pro-Microsoft since the beginning of time, threw the piece of shit in the trash.
Literally.
They didn't repurpose it, didn't give it way, didn't recycle it. They literally threw it in the trash and swore against ever using it again.
This plummeting revenue mirrors our experience with it. Shockingly, Microsoft's Surface revenue has dropped by only 285 million. They couldn't pay us to even pretend to use it.
Who care, MS Stock is UP and they beat their first quarter earnings estimate. MS is making money on Office, Azure, Windows, and annual support agreements. The surface was an experiment that some people love but more people hate. I am in the hater camp for both the MS Surface and the new Mac Book Pro. Someone make some decent hardware, please.... pretty please. For full disclosure, the last device was a Lenovo Yoga. The Yoga is 80% to getting to a MacBook Pro. Screen is too shiny, the right shift key is in the wrong spot, and the touchpad has the stupid line for left click on one side and right click on the other. Using a Yoga as a Tablet with Windows 10 is a lackluster user experience, just give me the iPad.
It doesn't mean there's a loss of interest. It just means that everybody who really wanted one already has one.
Now all they have to do is release updates every year or so for those users to give them an upgrade path.
And, apparently, something they might also have to do is to have Apple go out of business, since Macs outsold Surface devices EIGHT TO ONE in the same time period:
https://hardware.slashdot.org/...
Speaking as a user of a similar product, interoperability was the wrong word, but I think I see his point. I always use it with the keyboard attached, just like a laptop. When trying to use it like a tablet (touchscreen only), it's a terrible experience that doesn't work well with most software on Windows. Pen input and touch input are only very occasionally useful, so the experience is overwhelmingly dominated by things that essentially need a keyboard and pointer device.
Moving forward, I think I'll stick to cheaper Android tablets for the things a Tablet can do, and traditional laptop for a Windows system when I need Windows (while tablet+keyboard is very similar experience once settled, it's clumsier than a laptop lid to set up, and much more awkward on the lap than a laptop.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.