A Radical Plan For Saving Microsoft's Surface RT 391
Nerval's Lobster writes "Last week, Microsoft announced that it would take a $900 million write-off on its Surface RT tablets. Although launched with high hopes in the fall of 2012, the sleek devices—which run Windows RT, a version of Windows 8 designed for hardware powered by the mobile-friendly ARM architecture—have suffered from middling sales and fading buzz. But if Microsoft decides to continue with Surface, there's one surefire way to restart its (metaphorical) heart: make it the ultimate bargain. The company's already halfway there, having knocked $150 off the sticker price, but that's not enough. Imagine Microsoft pricing the Surface at a mere pittance, say $50 or $75 — even in this era of cheaper tablets, the devices would fly off the shelves so fast, the sales rate would make the iPad look like the Zune. There's a historical precedent for such a maneuver. In 2011, Hewlett-Packard decided to terminate its TouchPad tablet after a few weeks of poor sales. In a bid to clear its inventory, the company dropped the TouchPad's starting price to $99, which sent people rushing into stores in a way they hadn't when the device was priced at $499. Demand for the suddenly ultra-cheap tablet reached the point that HP needed weeks to fulfill backorders. (Despite that sales spike, HP decided to kill the TouchPad; the margins on $99 obviously didn't work out to everyone's satisfaction.) In the wake of Microsoft announcing that it would take that $900 million write-down on Surface RT, reports surfaced that the company could have as many as six million units sitting around, gathering dust. Whether that figure is accurate—it seems more based on back-of-napkin calculations than anything else—it's almost certainly the case that Microsoft has a lot of unsold Surface RTs in a bunch of warehouses all around the world. Why not clear them out by knocking a couple hundred dollars off the price? It's not as if they're going anywhere, anyway."
Re:A Better Option (Score:5, Informative)
You mean reprogram them with something better and slap a different label on them? Cause thats what actually happened with ET according to people who worked at atari.
Re:Dumping? (Score:5, Informative)
'In economics, "dumping" is a kind of predatory pricing, especially in the context of international trade.'
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dumping_(pricing_policy) [wikipedia.org]
Re:Dumping? (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Dumping? (Score:5, Informative)
Re:$100 for useless is still useless (Score:5, Informative)
Excuse me... pay attention.
Windows RT. No UEFI key available to the user. No alternative boot. No way to even develop your own non-Metro application.
It renders the Surface RT table a glorified rock... unless you happen to want to run software from Microsof't's app store. Even then... $100 may be overpriced.
Re:Dumping? (Score:5, Informative)
That's not the definition of a Loss Leader.
Re:Not so radical. (Score:5, Informative)
There's no "port" involved. Or rather, they already did that. Then they added literally one configuration change to lock out non-MS-signed desktop apps. One change. It's a single flag in the kernel. On x86 and x64 builds of Windows NT, it's not set. On ARM builds of Windows NT (RT and WP8), it is.
Clear that flag (which is what the current "jailbreak" hack for RT does), and you can run any desktop software that will compile for ARM, or any .NET program, or any other language that can be run through one of the others (for example, Java is possible through IKVM, a .NET program implementing a JVM).
Now, as for domain joining, that's actually a simpler problem. All versions of Windows NT have had multiple SKUs (editions) ranging from the do-anything highest-end Server builds to the very crippled Starter builds. It's all the same codebase, just a configuration change. RT falls somewhere between Win8[Home] and Win8Pro SKUs in terms of business-y features; it can use BitLocker encryption (usually not available on Home) but cannot join domains (usually available on anything *except* Home).
Working around that particular restriction is also possible, though it is not easy unless you also remove the signature enforcement ("jailbreak") at which point it becomes nearly trivial.
Oh, and there's already a (very early and still incomplete) x86 emulation layer (actually, dynamic recompilation) for "jailbroken" RT devices. It's slow, as one would expect, but it can run old games and desktop software just fine. It also is the work of a single homebrew developer working from public documentation and reverse engineering for the Windows interoperability (calls to system libraries are thunked to ARM code, which is both faster than using x86 libraries and requires less install space). Microsoft could do a better job easily by putting a few of their people who previously worked in that space (for example, the "Virtual PC for Mac" software worked the same way, some of them are probably still around) on the job.
Re:Lawyers sharpen your pencils (Score:2, Informative)
It's not called "Dumping" it is called "Liquidating" - There is a difference..
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Re:$100 for useless is still useless (Score:5, Informative)
SecureBoot is no big deal, at least I haven't had too many problems with it. I'm running Linux right now on a 13" Pro Retina, and UEFI wasn't too much of an issue.
Apple laptops don't use secure boot. EFI does not imply secure boot.
Re:Remember the "macintosh XL"? (Score:3, Informative)
Part of that was because you could upgrade the Mac XL to way higher specs than the Mac or Mac 512k. You could jam 2MB of RAM in there, which no Mac was going to get until the Mac II line. Oh, and it had a hard disk.