Microsoft Makes Another "Nearly Sold Out" Claim For the Surface Line 262
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."
Who cares about? (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Who cares about? (Score:5, Funny)
Metro interfece is nice, but useless without software.
Microsoft interfeces? Sounds like shitty interfaces to me!
Re:Who cares about? (Score:5, Interesting)
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? :\
Re:Who cares about? (Score:4, Funny)
Microsoft usually can see the train coming long before it arrives.
Microsoft's train of thought is still boarding at the station.
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Microsoft's train of thought is still boarding at the station.
I'm not sure their thinking process [prostockdetectors.com] qualifies as a train. I'd say that looks more like the rail equivalent of the short bus.
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Re: Who cares about? (Score:5, Funny)
I'm not sure, but the end of the line must be coming soon.
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I'm not sure, but the end of the line must be coming soon.
Meanwhile, Balmer was seen walking nearby, complaining about how this stairway never seemed to end, and how poorly designed it was because the banister was so low.
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Not until they have moved their proprietary software to another platform...
Re:Oh, you guys... (Score:4, Insightful)
CUPERTINO, Transylvania, Friday — After bricking unlocked iPhones, kicking applications off the iPhone store that might even slightly compete with iTunes in the far future and filing a wave of patents on basic well-known computer science, Apple Inc. today filed a Form 8-K with the Securities and Exchange Commission declaring that it was openly adopting Evil as a corporate policy. [newstechnica.com]
"Fuck it," said Zombie Steve Jobs to an audience of soul-mortgaged thralls, "we're evil. But our stuff is sooo good. You'll keep taking our abuse. You love it, you worm. Because our stuff is great. It's shiny and it's pretty and it's cool and it works. It's not like you'll go back to a Windows phone. Ha! Ha!"
Steve Ballmer of Microsoft was incensed at the news. "Our evil is better than anyone's evil! No-one sweats the details of evil like Microsoft! Where's your antitrust trial, you polo-necked bozo? We've worked hard on our evil! Our Zune's as evil as an iPod any day! I won't let my kids use a lesser evil! We're going to do an ad about that! I'll be in it! With Jerry Seinfeld! Beat that! Asshole.”
"Of course, we're still not evil," said Sergey Brin of Google. "You can trust us on this. Every bit of data about you, your life and the house you live in is strictly a secret between you and our marketing department. But, hypothetically, if we were evil, it's not like you're going to use Windows Live Search. Ha! Ha! I'm sorry, that's my ‘spreading good cheer' laugh. Really."
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Sure Microsoft has cost businesses and consumers billions due to their willful incompetence and set computing back a few decades, but I don't think MS can match the destruction that these other companies have wrought.
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Re:Who cares about? (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Having the idea is, sadly, the easy part (and Microsoft was far from the first - check out Sun's future doodles from a few decades ago). Its getting all the pesky details right and having a solid combination of hardware, software, and demand that's tricky. That's what Apple is far better at than the current Microsoft.
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check out Sun's future doodles from a few decades ago
Where can you find these?
Re:Who cares about? (Score:4, Interesting)
I'm not sure when MS came up with their first tablet sketches, but Apple made this film in 1987: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JIE8xk6Rl1w [youtube.com]
It's scaringly accurate.
Re:Who cares about? (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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That is what it looks like in retrospect, but to put it metaphorically, Microsoft was already on a different train hoping it would take them where THEY wanted to go.
In the case of the Internet, they were on the train headed for making their proprietary MSN service the one true ultima
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You need to go back farther than that. .- They bought DOS from that guy in Seattle. Well, what would later become DOS anyway, still not their product to start with .- The GUI came from Xerox PARC, but they actually "stole" it after Apple had licensed the thing and worked with MS to make software for it. .- They bought Word, Excel and PowerPoint from other companies.
MS cash cows were not their products to start with... though they've "refined" them over the years, improved the integration between the product
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Just thought I'd add to that: Microsoft had Xenix before DOS. They were on the Unix car and jumped off.
Re:Who cares about? (Score:5, Informative)
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 [youtube.com]. 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.
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Microsoft released Windows for Pen Computing somewhere around Windows 3.1 (1991ish?). The Pen addons continued through the 9x releases. Granted it's not really a tablet initiative by Microsoft personally, but they dabbled in it. It worked reasonably well, and was a full real copy of Windows. They pretty much suffered the same limitations as later Tablet PCs (and today's tablets), though. Mousing was great, any sort of data input was a giant pain and pretty much required an addon keyboard.
Re:Who cares about? (Score:5, Informative)
Apple started work on Newton in the 1980s, released it in 1993, and discontinued it in 1998.
But the idea for tablets has been around since computers gained user interfaces. The most famous is Alan Kay's Dynabook [wikipedia.org] from 1972.
Pen-driven and portable computers come in waves. There was the GRiDPad generation in the 1980s (roughly ending with Windows for Pen Computing). There was the EPOC generation in the 1990s (from which we get the Microsoft product, WinCE). There was the TabletPC generation, promoted by Bill Gates but sabotaged by the Office division. Now we're in the iOS and Android era.
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To be fair about the GPS thing, it was operational by 1993 (ads are 93-94) and given the success of LORAN, it was pretty clear that the ability to precisely locate one's self would be extremely useful to civilians (though this was before Clinton declared that it would officially be a "dual use system"). Toss in a little bit of Moore's Law and it was reasonable to expect that it wouldn't be too long before you could store road information, compute a route, render it in real-time, and synthesize audio to desc
Re:Who cares about? (Score:5, Interesting)
You know, I keep hearing this, but MS's vision for tablet computing was very, very different. I actually owned several examples of MS's tablet PCs, and then owned a first gen iPad. I now have a Nexus 10, in case anyone wondered.
The Tablet PC (TPC) was big, heavy, had horrible battery life, and almost always was a convertible laptop as well. They pictured the laptop becoming a portrait orientated clipboard lookalike, with the full processing power, heat, noise, etc of the laptops of the day.
Apple launched the iPad and it was thinner, lighter, cooler-running and longer-lasting than any major laptop of the time. Laptops were just starting to hit the 5 pound mark and still be usable, iPad was around 1 pound. laptops were still pushing 15-16" displays very hard, the iPad was right around 9 inches diagonal. Laptops were generally between 1 and 2 hours run time, the iPad did anywhere from 8 hours on up, depending on how you had power management set up.
Sure, the broadest strokes of your statement are true. Microsoft announced tablet PCs years before Apple and everyone yawned. However, it wasn't (only) because it was from Microsoft. It was because the idea was premature, and the MS version we were sold sucked rather hard.
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The Tablet PC (TPC) was big, heavy, had horrible battery life, and almost always was a convertible laptop as well. They pictured the laptop becoming a portrait orientated clipboard lookalike, with the full processing power, heat, noise, etc of the laptops of the day.
That's what the technology was capable of the time --- you needed the CPU power, to run the applications, therefore you needed all the thermal management that comes along with it.
Apple's tablet came at a later time, when CPUs had greatly
Re:Who cares about? (Score:5, Insightful)
So what you're saying is that MS chose to make a shitty product and launch it prematurely, while Apple chose to wait until the right hardware was available and then design a suitable OS for it?
Yes, but Apple waited a lot longer than they needed to -- probably in order to get it "perfect", in Steves' eyes, and they made a good first impression.
While Apple was wasting much time; engineering the most aesthetically pure tablet they could muster, and worrying about very small improvements in size and weight --- MS was busy making and then trying to fix Vista.
Netbooks and Ultrabooks were becoming popular at the time --- the very low power CPU options were available, multitouch, and all the tech required to make a tablet.
Hell.. TechCrunch was working on the Crunchpad (before one of their vendors double-crossed them, stole their intellectual property, and went to develop JooJoo pad on their own)
Microsoft had plenty of time and opportunity to adapt their Tablet PC to a lighter design, improve the touch experience, and release a tablet faster than Apple, which would be a credible offering; and, by the way, cannibalize much of Apple's prospects in the tablet market.
The fact of the matter is... Microsoft must have been asleep at the switch.
Frankly, there should have been firings within their management team, for not seeing this.
Microsoft failed to recognize the problems that had made their Tablet PC not so successful, and failed to recognize changes in available technology, that would enable them to pivot, and change their product into a successful one satisfying customer needs.
And they failed to execute on the opportunity: that should have been visible plain as day, to anyone with any vision in that company.
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with the full processing power, heat, noise, etc of the laptops of the day.
This was where they failed for me. I had a couple different Fujitsu Stylistics, and overall I loved it. OneNote was great for notes, and had pretty decent handwriting recognition. I could run any Windows application, and overall it did great. I could sync notes across devices and access them anywhere. It was pretty impressive stuff for ~2000. But the big downfall was the jet engine fan and battery life. I'd be in a quiet classroom or office meeting, and the fan would kick on. I'd get That Look from people a
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That's still not counting the biggest reason it sucked so hard and that was that it had a touchscreen but it wasn't designed to use with your fingers. I had one demonstrated to me and there was hardly anything you could get done without the stylus because the interface required pinpoint precision, which made it more like a laptop with a very awkward mouse. As far as I can recall it wasn't multi-touch either which was fine for the stylus but means you couldn't do pinches and stretches nor fast typing. I reme
Re:Who cares about? (Score:5, Interesting)
The problem is they are too tied to the idea of tying everything to windows...
They put windows on a tablet, and the interface of both the os and its applications were unsuitable for tablets, making them awkward to use and thus undesirable. Apple didn't tie their tablet to osx, they made a different systems designed for a touch interface and it sold.
Similarly microsoft refuse to accept that windows is a poison pill, they seem to think that people love the brand and will buy anything thats branded as windows when in reality they are more like an incumbent monopoly telco - they have lots of customers in their core market because they are seen as the only game in town, but they are almost universally despised and people will actively avoid them when they have a choice.
Windows is associated with crashing, unreliability, complexity and malware... Users now believe that these are inherent and unavoidable problems in the computer market, and don't want to bring these problems to their phones.
Re:Who cares about? (Score:4, Interesting)
The problem is they are too tied to the idea of tying everything to windows...
They put windows on a tablet, and the interface of both the os and its applications were unsuitable for tablets, making them awkward to use and thus undesirable. Apple didn't tie their tablet to osx, they made a different systems designed for a touch interface and it sold.
Apple *did* use an existing platform on their tablets: iPhone OS. If they had come out with a tablet with a brand new platform then it probably would've been a flop - having no third party software would've been a big problem.
What Apple did was create the iPhone - originally this ran *no* third party software at all (hell, even though it was marketted as a smartphone, it really wasn't - there were a very limited selection of built in apps and it didn't do many of the things people had come to expect from a smartphone). What they did get right was that they were about the first phone to incorporate a decent web browser - that appealed to the masses, even though the lack of "normal" smartphone features made it not appeal to a lot of the usual smartphone demographic.
People started to jailbreak iPhones so they could build third party software, and a few years down the line Apple created their appstore and allowed official third party applications. By the time they started selling the iPad, they already had a big following of iPhone fanboys and a huge library of third party apps - these are the things that made the iPad worth having.
Android tablets are basically the same story - by the time they became available there were already a *lot* of happy android phone users and a big library of third party software. When you're happy with your phone, buying a tablet that runs exactly the same OS and can run all your favorite apps is a much lower risk than something that is completely unknown to you.
Similarly, MS have always wanted to keep their existing users and existing third party software library when they release a tablet - if they release a tablet with a brand new OS (which people are therefore not familiar with, making buying the device a bigger risk for them) and no third party software then they aren't going to sell well... which is *exactly* what they are seeing with Windows RT.
MS's problem is that they completely missed the boat with phones, so now they have no "popular" platform to shove on a tablet except Windows itself, which is completely unsuitable. They also seem to be foolishly muddying the waters by using the "windows" brand on Windows RT, despite it not being at all compatible with Windows... I guess they're hoping they can sucker a few people into buying an otherwise unknown OS by misleading them to believe its something they are familiar with.
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Because apple did it right.
Honestly Microsoft tried the tablet 5 times before then and screwed it up every single time. Granted the first time back when Windows 3.1 for pen computing came out it was a technology problem.
But everything that microsoft does is half assed, unless they BUY someone elses product and sell it as their own.. Like the Xbox.
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If Microsoft's attempt at a tablet wasn't so abysmal, people would have bought it. They're just not that good at interfaces.
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"They are still bitter that they had the idea for a tablet long before Apple", not really. They took a thing that had no keyboard and bunged window onto and then expected people to use it for...what precisely? Apple took a small energy sipping processor and combined it with an app store and a gui that didn't smell like dog's breath.
Re:Who cares about? (Score:4, Informative)
Actually 1999 is only the time period when MS created their own hardware design for a tablet. Before that they were pushing Windows for Pen, a Windows 3.1 based tablet OS. WfP was generally miserable, mostly vaporware. It was created soley for the purpose of putting GO Computing out of business. ( Why by a GO tablet when you can buy a fully interoperable WfP tablet ? )
GO computing and the Netwon were near simultaneous creations. In fact AT&T made tablets in 1991 using the GO os.
After the Newton failed and GO was destroyed by MS, tablet computing faded for a while--except for certain niche areas--I remember statistics collecting companies interested, and UPS/FedEx/ DHS/others, used primitive tablets because portable computing was important.
It was some time during this period of neglect that Bill Gates took up the tablet as a note taking device. He was the first one who was seriously pushing for a long period of time.
On another note, it was John Sculley who pushed real hard for the Newton. The initial Mac was supposed to be Steve Jobs redemption. Proving that Woz was not the only genius at Apple. In the same sense the Newton was to be Sculley redemption, showing that Apple could get along without Jobs.
Kind of ironic that now it's Jobs who gets the most credit for inventing the tablet.
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It's actually the best description I've seen in a long time.
2 available for preorder, 1 sold (Score:4, Funny)
Re: 2 available for preorder, 1 sold (Score:3)
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Actually, Microsoft should give Ballmer a gold-plated Surface when he retires, and then retire the brand. "Good-bye, Mr. Ballmer, and please take your Surface with you." The Surface 1 & 2 were Ballmer's. The Surface 3, which is probably in development now, would also be his. The new CEO should just scrap the Surface 3 plans, and start again.
Pick a small team of the best and brightest Microsoft hardware and software engineers, and task them with creating an astonishing new product. This must have s
I don't believe a word they say (Score:4, Insightful)
Hooray, marketing! (Score:2)
If anything, a good marketer is worth her weight in gold. A story I once heard about the importation of fabric from India (Madras fabric, although no one in what was once called madras knows it as such.. it's just fabric there...) that it was cheap and durable, but the colors bled something awful when washed. Customers were returning clothing made from this fabric in droves for the "defect" of fading. The industry was losing their asses and turned to a marketer.. who turned it around by marketing the fad
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If anything, a good marketer is worth her weight in gold.
If that's so, why aren't the morbidly obese more employable?
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Yes, a great marketer is an useful asset. For some reason, Microsoft has managed to miss the boat, train and pretty much every other bit of transport when it comes to selecting a marketing plan. "You make a grown man cry" (Windows 95). Dozens of confusing names - Surface, Surface Pro, Surface RT, Windows RT, this, that. Dozens of confusing Skus. Zune brown. ** Any ** consumer oriented Microsoft advert.
It's not that Apple is so polished marketing wise, it's just that Microsoft continuously manages to s
We can trust them (Score:2, Funny)
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I'm actually getting really tired of this type of comment. I see it pretty much every time a company or government is involved in the story. Yeah I get it; you can't trust them. Can we move on now and stop fishing for easy mod points with obvious posts?
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It may seem obvious to you, but then the fanbois and apologists show up and prove that it's less obvious than you would hope.
Re:We can trust them (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
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Well, if you want to get into a discussion about semantics, maybe. My point is that you can trust them, after a fashion. And, consequently, that the notion that they are all just liars, so there is no point in listening to them, is flawed. Hence, the distinction is relevant.
Then we could of course discuss whether any deception is equally immoral, regardless of whether it is a technically truthful statement or not, but that would be to head off on a tangent, so I'm going to leave it at your comments and my o
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No, I cannot trust them. Any truth I might derive from their utterances comes from assuming that their intent is to deceive and then to lie about the deception. That is not trust.
Not trusting them doesn't men I shouldn't evaluate what they have said in an attempt to get at a purely unintentional disclosure of truth. In lies, as in gifts, it's the thought that counts.
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Again, it depends on how you want to define trust. I trust (within reasonable bounds) that they will behave according to a certain morality -- a morality to which I may not agree with, but one that I know and understand.
My impression is that you prefer to define their behaviour as lies, in order to invoke the immorality commonly associated with lies. In a sense: if what they do is similar to and just as bad as lies, we should value them equally. And in that regard, I think you are missing my point. I am not
Re:We can trust them (Score:4, Insightful)
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Can you propose a more effective method than ridicule for changing undesired behavior?
In the case of Microsoft, apparently it is not and 'effective" method.
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Technically correct (Score:2)
is the best kind of correct.
I know someone who has been sued many times over the years. Normal course of business this and that.
Told me he "never lost a lawsuit". That is because he settled all of them out of court for undisclosed sums.
So technically he is correct. He never lost a lawsuit.
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Who is this guy? I'd like to get some out of court settlement funds.
If you really want to move Surface Tablets (Score:2)
Sell it for $300 and let me run Android on it. No fair refusing to open up your hardware information to the community. I dig the form factor, but I hate the OS.
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Close, it's 350
but no you will not be able to run android on it.
really? (Score:2)
It's almos as if they were fishing for ridicule. Are you guys sure there isn't a whiteboard somewhere in MS marketing where they track the scores of who can make the most ridiculous statement and still be taken seriously by at least some media?
Re:really? (Score:4, Informative)
Nah, they're doing just like they always do.
When they say "Windows 19 sold 14 trillion copies" before the release, what they really mean is that they sold most of the inventory from the manufacturer warehouse to vendors. For example...
BestBuy has something like 2,900 retail stores.
Walmart has about 10,130 stores.
That's 13,130 stores. At 100 units each, that's 1.3M units shipped. Every one of them was sold, as they've been sold to the stores. Not a single one is in the hands of a consumer yet.
They don't indicate the batch size. On the first edition, they had an overstock of 6M units, so we could assume the batch was about 8M. 1.3M shipped to the above two vendors. 0.7M to other vendors. 6M unsold, because the vendors never moved them all.
On this version, if they only produced 1M, they would be 0.3M under, creating this artificial lack of supply. If they can hype it up, and people buy out what's already been shipped to vendors, the vendors will order more. They could probably get 2M sold to consumers, from the perceived inability to get one.. Consumers are dumb. They'll say "oohh, they're almost sold out! I need to get one while I can!"
Re:really? (Score:5, Insightful)
That's what MS believes. I don't think it works anymore.
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I think it's more about playing the stock market, it sounds so much better when you're sold out by slightly undersupplying the market even if it doesn't bring in more sales - perhaps even a bit less as people pick something else instead. "Almost sold out" sounds more like "we really wanted to give you the news that it was sold out but people bought fewer than our lowballed estimates so we're saying they almost sold out" at this point.
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Try adding the words "Potential Microsoft Surface" to the front of that sentence and it works a bit better...
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Consumers aren't dumb. They are just individuals with limited resources up against a multi-billion dollar marketing machine (with a software department attached).
It's like going against an aircraft carrier battle group in a rubber boat with sticks.
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You're absolutely right. They have been attempting to break into the market since "Windows Pocket PC", "Windows CE", and "Windows XP Tablet PC Edition". The one thing they're failing to recognize is that consumers work on very strange rationale. That's how Microsoft really took over the consumer market to start. "oohh, it comes with this new buzzword "Microsoft".". Apple and Android currently own the small device market. Not long ago, Blackberry owned the phone portion, but their fai
My Car (Score:2)
My car is also almost sold out! In fact, its no longer on the market due to forecast internal demand. Wow! It must be amazing1111!!!!1!
translation (Score:2)
All our hard work has paid off! Those channels are more stuffed than ever before.We'll deal with the buyback clause quietly in a quarter or two.
Microsoft Kin (Score:2, Interesting)
Remember the Kin?
I do.
You don't? Never seen one in the wild?
I've never seen one in the wild either, just like I haven't seen any kind of Surface (RT,Pro,Pro2) in the wild either. Sold out, eh? Sold out as in "pushed into the channel by threatening our customers over discounts for other things"?
The Kin is sitting in the landfill, on top of the concrete covering the pile of Lisas. It may soon have company.
--
BMO
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Remember the Kin?
Microsoft missed a great marketing opportunity when, following the demise of the Kin, they failed to call their next mobile offering "The Next of Kin"
What would make it sell... (Score:2)
There are some features they should really consider adding that would make it blow away an iPad for utility:
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Maybe. This is MS after all; outside of XBox, they have absolutely no clue how to market to consumers.
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How well documented is the hardware?
If Microsoft builds enough they might wind up going real cheap here in another year or two. If there are free drivers the things might be worth picking up then.
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Surface 2 - your typical mess of binaries for this and that characteristic of ARM.
Surface Pro 2 - typical ultrabook hardware, so it should be relatively well supprted.
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Which is the reason Microsoft is making the Surface in the first place. Do you really think they care if they lose a billion dollars on the hardware if it increases demand for windows 8 devices?
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>All of which are available in a ASUS tablet, at a much lower price.
This. The 'second tier' manufacturers are making the same hardware with the same silicon for a lower price with sane interfaces and you can run your choice of OS on them.
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DisplayPort is better than HDMI, and in practice mini DisplayPort to HDMI adapter are only slightly more expensive than micro HDMI to HDMI.
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DisplayPort is better than HDMI, and in practice mini DisplayPort to HDMI adapter are only slightly more expensive than micro HDMI to HDMI.
Absolutely, I've got 2550x1440 monitors using display port, try doing that with HDMI
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Don't confuse the iZombies and MS knee-jerk haters with facts or information... they don't like that. Seriously I wish CmdrTaco was still here, there used to be some editorial objectivity back in the day. Now it's just 'post any MS article for automatic mod ups' .
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Well, as you pointed out, it has that and it hasn't been selling.
For me those things don't really matter...
USB - I can print just fine with AirPrint. Mouse... I vaguely remember seeing one of those last decade.
SD card slot - There's an adapter, but why bother when I can just use WiFi hard drives and WiFi SD cards?
Video out port. As long as I'm buying an adapter, what's the difference in buying an adapter for the iPad versus another for the Surface? I've rarely used mine since AirPlay is much easier.
What
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Since when is exposing the filesystem to the user a negative?
You must be kidding if you're trying to push Wi-Fi and Bluetooth over USB. Let me just grab my Wi-Fi pen drive! Or my Bluetooth HDD!
Since what you are saying in your first paragraph is completely absurd, I conclude that you have no idea what you're talking about.
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Yeah, Apple users don't complain because iPad is all about media consumption. They have a browser and game device they can hold in their hands and that's all they really want. Inside it's a computer but making it work however the user wants is not on Apple's business plan.
My wife has an iPad and has complained about her inability to make it drive a printer. I have not been able to use it to get pictures from my digital camera without using another computer. I can stick an SDCard from the camera directly
Proprietary RF (Score:2)
Bluetooth and wifi beats USB host mode any day
Provided your other devices support Bluetooth and Wi-Fi. A lot of digital cameras, for example, don't support Wi-Fi, and Microsoft's own game controllers use proprietary RF instead of standard Bluetooth. Besides, some Bluetooth input devices need to be connected through USB to pair before they can be used on Bluetooth.
The surface has [...] a totally worthless ecosystem.
Here's one way Microsoft has made the RT ecosystem worthless: Has Microsoft ported Visual Studio to RT or even left enough hooks in the OS for a third party to port any IDE? You can run AIDE o
Microsoft Stats (Score:3, Interesting)
Microsoft is well known for juggling with stats. As an example - their stats of Windows Phone popularity in UK.
Here is an oversimplified example: There are 100 devices on the market, 70% are mine, 5% are yours. I sell 60, he sells 30, you sell 20. What is your market share now? 11.9%. There is no word about the cap that market has for your devices.
So, while you are selling less than anyone, your market share grew twice for the period, bigger than of anyone else (perhaps because for Android such growth would mean gaining 140% of the market share).
The point is - if you produce 10 tablets and sell 9, then perhaps you sell more tablets that Apple, if counted in percents. But your stats are miserable when counted in real units. Microsoft relies on percents more and more over the years, refusing to provide real numbers, and I can't help but to conclude that they are trying to play big, while being in trouble.
Almost sold as in... (Score:2)
I need a MS article filter (Score:2)
because every time anything is posted about MS, it's just an echo chamber here, umpteen useless uninformative posts about how evil, bad, etc MS is (and usually how awesome Apple is). I don't even know why /. bothers to post any MS articles, the comments are the exact same every time -- pointless with no value.
Money, dear boy (Score:2)
I don't even know why /. bothers to post any MS articles, the comments are the exact same every time -- pointless with no value.
It brings in ad clicks [tvtropes.org].
Shipped vs Sold Out (Score:2)
The one shipped out was returned. That was all they made. This is a bit different than Apple who counts actual sales to end users... 9,000,000 iPhone's sold in the first weekend. But not sold out. They're still making more for next week.
I Know Someone Who Bought Them For a Small School! (Score:3)
They have a double-digit purchase of the devices and it will be no surprise that the Microsoft people gave them a GREAT deal per unit.
I don't know a whole lot about tablets nor do I care but I test drove one for a while. My nearest experience comparison is with the Android/Play marketplace. If you are an Android user, the interface doesn't have any surprises.
What's hilarious is the almost empty "marketplace." The only thing in it were apps written by the few companies Microsoft hasn't managed to crush or alienate. Of the few apps in the marketplace, imagine single-digit reviews being a heavily reviewed/downloaded application.
The buyer was promised special "support" because so many (double digits!!!!) were bought, but that was an epic waste of the buyer's time. Eventually someone determined to use the thing found someone at Microsoft that knew something about the devices. It wasn't in support, that's for sure. There are apparently a large number of undocumented features essentially paving the way for an "enterprise tablet" inside the Microsoft ActiveDirectory/groupware-whatever jail.
I've got a negative bias because I don't "get" tablets. Me, personally, it's not even close to the Android ecosystem and the blinky tiles do nothing for me. Judging by how many tiny promises were broken and time wasted for the buyer and almost empty marketplace the device is doomed. Microsoft could keep it going though just to say they've got a tablet.
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They nearly sold out when, at the counter, the customer said "Cool, now I can finally use some apps" to which the salesman replied "Oh, I'm sorry, you have the wrong tablet, let me get you an iPad or Android tablet".
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They nearly sold out when, at the counter, the customer said "Cool, now I can finally use some apps" to which the salesman replied "Oh, I'm sorry, you have the wrong tablet, let me get you an iPad or Android tablet".
Yeah, right. More like the salesman got triple commission for helping shift their dust-gathering stock of Surface tablets, lied through his/her/its teeth about the apps it could run and will deny ever having said any of that when the pissed-off customer returns.
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I use C++ and I never think about memory management.
Once every six months or so the memory checker will beep at me. It's always a trivial fix.
The best part is: I know that files aren't staying open outside their scope, etc.
Re:Nice... (Score:5, Funny)
Guys, guys... lets talk about something we can all agree on like Abortion or Religion... we know everyone here isn't going to agree on which language is best...
When your boss sees growth in non-M$ systems (Score:2)
But really, who cares about it only running on MS systems? If I write software for MS systems then that's the system I want it to run on.
Unless your software costs more than a computer, your software runs on the system that users have. And when your boss sees growth in non-Microsoft systems, your boss will want you to figure out how to make an application available on non-Microsoft systems. For example, a video game studio might choose to diversify into PS4 and SteamOS in case the rumors that Xbox One will become Xbomb One turn out true. Or you might see a lot of hits to your app's web site but low conversion rates, check the logs to find ou
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