I wanted to pick up on something from my story earlier today about Microsoft and Google missing their numbers. One thing that came out of Microsoft’s earnings report is the fact that they took a $900 million dollar writedown on Surface tablets.
Microsoft said the $900 million charge was related to its Surface RT tablet, the version of its tablet running on ARM-designed chips and using a ‘lite’ version of Windows 8. The Surface was meant to challenge Apple’s iPad when it was launched alongside Windows 8 in October, but has not sold well.
According to IDC the company only shipped 900,000 of the tablets in the first three months of 2013. Earlier this week in an apparent bid to boost flagging sales the company announced a dramatic price cut of £100 off the basic Surface RT tablet.
Taking the £590m write-down into account, it would suggest that Microsoft has a store of six million unsold Surface tablets.
It would also suggest that consumers like the Surface tablets as much as they like BlackBerry Playbooks. In other words, they don’t like them at all. I suspect that all the discounts in the world aren’t going to turn that around and Microsoft will need to do something dramatic to turn things around.
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This entry was posted on July 19, 2013 at 10:07 am and is filed under Commentary with tags Microsoft. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.
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Surface Tablets A #Fail For Microsoft
I wanted to pick up on something from my story earlier today about Microsoft and Google missing their numbers. One thing that came out of Microsoft’s earnings report is the fact that they took a $900 million dollar writedown on Surface tablets.
Microsoft said the $900 million charge was related to its Surface RT tablet, the version of its tablet running on ARM-designed chips and using a ‘lite’ version of Windows 8. The Surface was meant to challenge Apple’s iPad when it was launched alongside Windows 8 in October, but has not sold well.
According to IDC the company only shipped 900,000 of the tablets in the first three months of 2013. Earlier this week in an apparent bid to boost flagging sales the company announced a dramatic price cut of £100 off the basic Surface RT tablet.
Taking the £590m write-down into account, it would suggest that Microsoft has a store of six million unsold Surface tablets.
It would also suggest that consumers like the Surface tablets as much as they like BlackBerry Playbooks. In other words, they don’t like them at all. I suspect that all the discounts in the world aren’t going to turn that around and Microsoft will need to do something dramatic to turn things around.
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This entry was posted on July 19, 2013 at 10:07 am and is filed under Commentary with tags Microsoft. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.