Scratching the Surface, by Arthur Tebbel – Pop Art #226 | @MDWorld

September 24, 2013 Arthur Tebbel 0 Comments

Dear Art,

I hope you were watching our press conference this week when we were very excited to introduce our new line of Surface tablets.  The first iteration did not do well requiring some deep price cuts and still not getting much traction in the market place.  It was reported over the summer that the marketing costs for the product exceeded the total sales.  That’s not good news.  The new models are more powerful and allow us to relaunch the whole brand.  I know you’re a bit of a techie and a bit of an early adopter.  Is there anything in the new announcements that would make you likely to ditch your iPad for a Surface tablet?

-Steve Ballmer, CEO, Microsoft

Steve,

It’s nice to get this letter from you right now.  I am kind of in the market for a new tablet.  My iPad is starting to look a little long in the tooth, the battery life is getting a little shorter and the app crashes are becoming a little more frequently as it’s clear that developers are no longer targeting my hardware.  I’m a fan of the iOS ecosystem and have bought a lot of apps for it so I’d have to say there’s a really solid inside track there.  I could imagine buying an Android tablet if I found some perfect combination of price and features that I can’t find anywhere else.  Unfortunately for you I think I’d rather gnaw my hands off and operate one of those other products with my wrist stumps than use a Windows RT product.

Windows RT doesn’t even have a Facebook app.  It’s been promised by the end of the year but holy crap how can you even pretend to be in the tablet market without something like that?  It underscores the larger problem of a dearth of applications for your software.  There are approximately 100,000 apps for Windows RT tablets right now compared to more than twice as many for iPads and maybe as many as four times as many for Android tablets (it’s harder to get numbers for Android because their app store is less sorted).  I have to believe every worthwhile app has been in an ad you’ve run that didn’t sell me on your last generation of hardware.  I don’t care how fast your hardware is or how current your USB ports are if there’s nothing to do on it.  Right now you have the Office suite and nothing.

There is the Surface Pro which is basically a Windows 8 laptop with a touch interface.  That’s probably a fine product if the battery life issues are as fixed as you say they are but that’s not competing with an iPad is it?  You would have to put that up against a full on laptop and why on earth would anyone buy a Surface Pro when they could have a MacBookAir or even a Sony VAIO and have a machine built by companies with a real pedigree in mobile development.  Steve, I know you’re resigning this year and a lot of people were pressuring you to do that because of the failure of the first round of Surface tablets but you can’t just take one more stab at doing the same thing and save that legacy.  Microsoft has gotten where it is now through software and abandoning that for an emphasis on shinier software is going to fail and it’s hideously disappointing to see you try that.