“We built a few more devices than we could sell,” Ballmer reportedly said.
Balmer is utterly missing the boat. MS did not build too many machines, it utterly fucked up the marketing of a really new kind of computer, a device that started out with impressive reviews, Imagine a tablet that really could replace a desktop or notebook! It is impossible not to wonder if the decision to market the Surface this way was not why Steve Sinofsky resigned.
The Surface RT, IF it had been sold even by the less than Jobs guy now running Apple, would have been a huge success. Words like “new” and “innovation” would have flown like pigeons feasting on bread crumbs!
One wonders if Mr. Balmer has knowledge of Japanese traditions of Seppuku? Shouldn’t a failure this big make Balmer consider an early retirement?
The commercials were so idiotic that friends of mind could not tell whether Mr. Balmer was selling soda pop or a life style. They were pretty sure the Surface (itself a naming problem) was not he ebst thing since the iPad. The great feature … built in Office, an amazing keyboard. a real file system, a universe of USB accessories .. even the price … ere utterly lost.
The too there was the bizarre decision to only sell the RT in 20 fledgling Microsoft stores. To make that worse, the stores were located across from Apple stores and looked like wannabes rather than anything new. Those 20 stores would have had to sell 300.000 machines each, to deal with Balmer’s mistake.
To cap all that, Microsoft utterly misunderstood the app world. How much effort woud it have taken for Balmer to buy or have his minions write a few key apps? One huge example … it was months before OneNote, an obvious came out in a usebale form and there still is not a good mail app that can work with gMAIL las well as apps on an Android or iPAD.
The only word for this is stupid.
Despite some good reviews, Microsoft had an extraordinarily difficult time getting the Surface off of shelves, and an overwhelming number of Surface RT tablets have been left unsold. If you break down the $900 million Microsoft lost on the Surface RT, it comes out to about 6 million unsold devices.
Still, Microsoft is working on the next generation of the tablet, and internal response to the new device has been positive at Microsoft, Neowin reports. I wish I beleived Balmer would also hure some folks better able to market and find someone to represent MS that has les sof a Frankenstein appearance. 