Early Surface Sales Pitiful

Nerval's Lobster writes "Microsoft has earned $853 million from sales of its Surface tablets, according to the company's annual Form 10-K filed with the SEC. That's a bit of a disaster, to put it bluntly. Earlier estimates put Surface sales at roughly 1.5 million units; the $853 million figure reinforces that projection. By comparison, Apple sold 14.6 million iPads in its last quarter alone. Adding insult to injury, Microsoft spent quite a bit producing and marketing Surface. The Windows division's 'cost of revenue increased $1.8 billion, reflecting a $1.6 billion increase in product costs associated with Surface and Windows 8, including a charge for Surface RT inventory adjustments of approximately $900 million,' read the Form 10-K. 'Sales and marketing expenses increased $1.0 billion or 34 percent, reflecting an $898 million increase in advertising costs associated primarily with Windows 8 and Surface.' Overall, Microsoft's Windows division earned $19.2 billion in its fiscal 2013."

sick of windows at work

[SkunkPussy]

Is the fundamental issue that people are sick of using shitty computers with shitty locked down versions of windows all day at work, so they don't want more of the same bullshit for their personal devices?

LOL you think so?

[Anonymous Coward]

Nice try but ask anyone on the street to name the operating system their iPad uses and they won't have a clue. Funny you say "locked down" because Apple seems to have perfected that idea. In reality its because the market is saturated already and most people don't use their tablets for much besides playing games while in the shitter. Your trolling is lame for someone with a low UID.

Failed Marketing

[bradgoodman]

Really?!??!

All those ads with people dancing around snapping covers on and off - opening and closing weren't enough to evangelize the masses as to the virtues of the technology?!?

As much as I hate Microsoft - it's sad to say - that the [very, very] few people who I know who actually had a Surface had nothing but RAVE reviews about them. The summary was: "Size/weight of an iPad - but with a real keyboard. I could take it to meetings, and actually run Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and Outlook. I could actually take notes with the keyboard - and not some "add-on" iPad type keyboard which made the iPad as big and bulky as a small laptop or netbook".

So in short - it was a real "productivity" device - not like tablet, which I still don't think is really good for anything but *light* web browsing and watching movies on a screen, the size of what we used to watch them on in the 70's.

Re:MS Suffering from Legacy Effects

[oGMo]

Well hooray for you, but I have to reboot win8 (game machine) constantly. Apparently, it has a well-known bug where it sends a reset command to the hard drive under certain conditions. This can cause the drive to go away until you power-cycle the machine (even the bios doesn't see it). It's not a BSOD: everything just stops working and you lose anything you were doing, because the drive it was running off is now gone. (It also blows away UEFI stuff, but fortunately you can get it booting grub again from the windows side.)

Happens extremely randomly on two entirely different systems with three different drives. Lots of reports. No fix.

Re:Marketing expenses

[jd2112]

Hollywood accounting?

It would be Hollywood accounting if they had sold 20 million units in the last quarter but still managed to loose billions of dollars.

Re:Wasn't that expected?

[unimacs]

Microsoft's view was that the iPad and similar Android tablets were fine for media consumption but were really lacking when it came to creating. Having a physical keyboard without adding significant weight or bulk was a killer feature in their mind.

A lot of people felt that Microsoft did an excellent job in designing the keyboard. A key point they missed though is that once you stick a keyboard on a tablet like that there's not much distinction between it and a small laptop. So why not just get a laptop?

One of the nice things about a tablet is that you don't need an flat surface available in order to use it. Microsoft's own Surface commercials show a bunch of people sitting around a table. A tablet that requires a desk in order to take advantage of one its key features isn't going to set the world on fire.

Easy - just unlock the bootloader.

[ron_ivi]

Main reason I won't get one is that when (not if) RT dies; all you have left is a paperweight.

At least with laptops, I can stick Linux on them when their version of windows gets too bogged down with viruses.