Steve Ballmer Explains The Need for Surface
There's no question that Microsoft's move to produce its own tablet was a big shock to the industry. The rumor mill knew the day would come, and when it did, it left some of us speechless and many OEM partners reportedly very unhappy. After all, the only first-party hardware Microsoft had on the market was the Xbox 360. Why bother with building a first-party tablet when you have numerous OEMs who could do the job?
"[Surface] was less different [than Xbox], you could say," Ballmer told ZDNet in an interview. "But, I also knew that it would not be the simplest discussion to have with our partners, who[m] I wanted to stay our partners."
He said he was concerned that Microsoft had areas of vulnerability in competing with Apple. Without any first-party capability, Microsoft was not transacting very well just through the company's OEM partners. He said that management's area of concern was the high-end tablet market, a place where Apple's iPad resides.
"Our OEMs were having a hard time investing in competing with the higher end brand," he said. "The [Microsoft retail] stores were [starting] to take off, but they hadn't taken off. It turns out that was also an issue, because now there's a different kind of a presence. And without a product to fit -- a product, a brand, a price point -- to really go head-to-head, it looked like an area of exposure."
"On the other hand, there was an area of vulnerability," Ballmer added. "The vulnerability we have is not just on phones, where we're buying Nokia, but it's on tablets. And our OEMs do great work, but there are places their brands and investments don't travel. And so we wanted to supplement the work of our OEMs, hopefully make our OEMs stronger through the process, by making our overall competition with Apple."
According to ZDNet, Ballmer considers tablets and phones as tools that make people -- such as IT, developers and consumers -- more productive. He defined Microsoft as a company that makes great software for productivity and fun, but the expression will be through services and the increasing number of devices.
"Maybe it always has been [this way]," he said. "Nobody ever buys Windows. They buy Windows PCs."
I think it was a mistake to implement the surface. First its just not a very good product as a lot more is expected of anything PC verse a console. The typical Microsoft manufacturers tend to produce cheap feeling devices and it shows in the Surface like it showed in the XBox360.
I think the bigger mistake Microsoft made was making Windows RT. As an OS exclusive to ARM based tablets, it has very little market presence and no real application development as a result. x86 based tablets on the other hand have a huge array of programs to install. If they just used the Windows Phone platform as an ARM based OS. It would have been fine as the developer only need to make 1 application to cover Windows ARM.
There is a lot of redundant programing involved in the current generation of Windows OSes, so it will be nice when that redundancy is done away with. When programming Windows 8 applications, you need to create a version for Core Window and Desktop. When creating something for ARM you need to create something for the phone and something else for the Tablet. A lot of that can be done away with.
it's been shown that surface is built to make a sizable amount of profit from hardware alone, from teardown analyses.
those apple comparisons are moot.
and now oems are flocking to google's malware-magnet data miner... ahem, i mean android platform.
Without the actual proof in the form of Microsoft’s offerings to back up Ballmer’s words… I take his comments as either evidence of his incompetence as a leader for missing their mark so badly or as lies to smooth over Microsoft trying to cut OEM partners out of hardware profits.
Sell a locked down device at a high markup and only offer the applications that run on it through a closed store controlled by them.
That plan failed because Microsoft underestimated the value placed on its own app ecosystem. The Surface only had Office which gave it an advantage over the iPad and Android but it turned out that Office didn't matter much to tablet buyers who primarily use these things for content consumption.
Has word, and can connect to home network to share files.
100 times more useful to a Windows user than an iPad. People are dumb and susceptible to marketing I guess.
id rather kill myself then do "office" work on one of them
Tablets didn't really fit well in the MS eco-system, there was no lead up to tablets from other MS products, there was no hole in the MS lineup that tablets would fill. MS revenue generators were primarily desktops, servers and Office software, none of which fits well with tablets or supports tablets. But MS was watching revenues drop from their product line up while Apple and Google watched profits soar from tablet markets.
So MS force fit their desktop products into a tablet with very poor results. From the MS perspective everybody needs a desktop experience even if they're using a tablet. And as we've all seen that approach produced a major marketing fail with the Surface tablets.
A company doesn't need a product outside of their area of competency, switching to produce products a company can only produce poorly will lead to failure. Let's hope Microsoft gets back on track before it's too late.
There's nothing wrong with the Surface except for the fact that that it underperforms in comparison to the iPad and is overpriced. If they can produce a Surface tablet that matches the picture quality, specs and price, that's half the battle right there. The other half, is re-doing the operating system. Windows Metro UI or whatever you want to call it now, is ugly, therefore dead in the water. It would be really inconvenient to use your standard Windows 95->7 interface on a tablet unless they made a few tweaks. Mainly, large icons/text making it finger friendly, and and easy way (for dumb people, even) to customize what's (what programs are shown) on the Start Menu. That, and finding a way to include Kinect into their Surface devices.
I got a Dell Venue for Christmas and I love this thing, it's a full PC in an 8" tablet. If it had 4G access it would be the ultimate - a real tablet without all the apps.
Nice.
Hint: mouse and keyboard need a desktop like phones and tablets need touch screen interfaces, whats good for one isn't good for another.
What MS is doing is like saying mayo and pickles works great on a hamburger and in potato salad so let's throw it on a steak!