“Microsoft just doesn’t know when to stop doing itself severe damage, and it’s latest desperate move is no exception.,” Charlie Demerjian writes for SemiAccurate. “If you thought it’s ‘valued partners’ were incensed before, just wait until you see how happy they are now.”
“The latest move is one again around that unloved child of Redmond that has seen abysmal sales. No not Windows 8, the other unloved child of Redmond, the Surface tablet,” Demerjian writes. “If you recall, Microsoft placated the OEMs a little, and we do mean little, by promising to only sell Surface through Microsoft stores and their direct web site… And so Surface failed, and Microsoft reacted, and broke their promises to the entire OEM base. Now you can buy a Surface at Best Buy, others will soon follow. That sub-1% non-Surface tablet sales number may be the high water mark. See Microsoft. See Microsoft panic. See Microsoft have no clue. See Microsoft management flail. See Microsoft react. See Microsoft kick the other leg out from under their OEM partners. See problem? Microsoft sure doesn’t.”
Read more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: For as long as it takes!
[Thanks to MacDailyNews Reader “Tayster” for the heads up.]
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I love Microsoft. They had years to learn from the iPad and they learned simply nothing. Great company.
Only a few years ago, after Bill Gates and Steve Jobs met, when Bill Gates left, he commented that Steve Jobs just did not get it, that Apple was over, not important…….
I think he still thinks that way.
So sad and yet so funny.
Just a thought.
When you continue to make the kind of money Microsoft makes, you simply can’t bring yourself to admit that you are wrong. You tolerate “mistakes” as simply miscalculations or errors, not the colossal failures which they are, because it doesn’t seriously impact your bottom line. Microsoft has been lulled into a drug-induced trance by the cash cow that is Windows/Office, and it won’t snap out of it until the bankruptcy trustee comes to sell the Redmond HQ.
@eldernorm
I hadn’t heard that one before…
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ROTFLOL
@Bizlaw
Monumental hubris.
When you make the money that MSFT makes, you can afford big failures. This can continue until you are no longer making the money that MSFT makes.
As long as the market is set up so Microsoft makes money on nearly every PC sold, even if you don’t want the OS on it, they can fund as much madness and tick people as much as they want. We’re still giving them money. Also, the way they manipulated the opendoc format, well, they’re going to continue to be “the standard” in office doc compatibility for a while to come.
And they had over a decade to frak around with tablets.
Come on already! Is it clueless or beleaguered? 🙂
It is cluelessly beleaguered! But we love them anyway as it is fun to watch what happens when arrogance and hubris causes demise.
It’s Beleaguered because it’s Clueless.
Meet Ballmer at the intersection of Clueless and Beleaguered.
Hey, he got voted Secod Worst CEO of the Year on CNBC yesterday. Ballmer’s got some serious cred, now!
So…who was voted the Worst? Who were the voters?
Worst was Andrew Mason of Groupon.
http://www.cnbc.com/id/100320782/_Greenberg_Worst_CEO_of_2012
Include rationale for choice, runner ups, etc.
He included Ron Johnson on his list.
+1
Zeke, I love that post – a slap in the face for Ballmer and a kiss on the cheek for Jobs. Beautiful 🙂
Becludgered?
RIM is Beleaguered, MS is Clueless.
Get it straight.
That’s “its” not “it’s,” Charlie!
What expression do we go with here? “Zuned” or “Played for Sure”?
Well, since the OEMs sure got played….
I’d go with “Zuned for Sure.” Most of us will know exactly what you meant.
xD
or “Surfaced”. Perhaps “Sub-Surfaced” or “Below Surface”.
Actually that last one was cruel. Below the Surface is a really cold, dark, lonely place.
I suppose we can now add “Surfaced”
+1
Some of the posts on this thread are making my sides split!!!
It’s a rounding error! tablets are square thats why M$ doesn’t get it. 🙂
You know, a real live mole, from Apple, in the Ballmer inner circle, couldn’t have done a better job.
Gee, how many billions would all of these incensed PC hardware manufacturers pay, with no where else to turn (Linux? Ha!), to license OSX? Each version a new license. It could even somehow be a crippled version, or always the previous version. I’d be funny.
this is an incident where only one word can suffice to describe the glee one feels at Microshaft’s continued stupidity: chortle.
So that’s what I’ve been doing. Chortling. Feels good.
I prefer to call it a very loud and long lasting “cruel chuckle.”
I think it rates an Evil Cackle myself.
Like this?
That’s a great scene!! True laugh.
Wait! What? Microsoft broke a “promise”?!?
I’m floored!
Sponge Ballmer Square Corners is a funny show about a guy trying to run a software company that is sinking into the ocean.
Why aren’t the stockholders asking for Ballmers head on a platter? Can a company really be this bad? Has apple put some secret double agents working in management that deliberately try to kill microsoft?
Does no one there see what a clusterf*ck that company is right now? Unbelievable. . . . . . truly . . . .How can apple stay razor sharp when its competition is so dim witted. Perhaps that Microsofts strategy all along. . . ‘cept they are not acting, they really are dimwits.
They’re reading the unskewed pols.
I’ve seen videos of MS staff showing off “beta” software and they really are clueless. Totally different environment and “aura” from Apple. Almost self-serving BS. Clueless is a great word.
Ballmer owns too much stock to get fired. Bad for them, good for the future of computing.
Delusion is Microsoft thinking their tablet will suddenly start selling just because it’s being sold by Best Buy. It just means Surface will have a higher “shipped” (but not sold) number, and then go into desperation fire sale mode more quickly.
Gee, read the comments on BB! 5 stars overall!!! Guess M$ employees being hard at work writing reviews! Hilarious, it receives 5 stars in all categories!
what – you mean hire astroturf shills to post glowing comments everywhere about Surface, W8, Windows Phone, etc??
oh NO! MS NEVER DOES THAT!! how could you think of such a tawdry marketing scam.
And now Microsoft is cornered and all alone as it faces irrelevance and a painful demise. Revenge is a dish best served cold, very very cold.
Microsoft clearly have another disaster on their hands with Surface. This follows Zune, Vista, Kin, previous tablets and the truly awful Windows CE phones and PDAs. Yet Windows Server, Exchange, SQL Server, Sharepoint et al retain huge market share, so they can get some things right. A clue to the problems MS have in the consumer space is Ballmer’s response to anything Apple – he laughs at it. Remember his guffaws over the price of the iPhone? Gates, too, laughed at Apple – “Doesn’t Jobs know he can’t win?”. Ballmer’s guffaws might be nervous laughter, but I suspect that MS runs on the “yes man” principle, where career success is to a great degree dependent on saying “how high?” when told to jump to fulfil a management directive. In other words, MS senior management have encapsulated themselves in a Microsoft reality distortion field, listening only to their own propoganda, amplified and fed back to them by underlings and captive clients. We saw something of the effect of this problem in the last election, where Republicans heard only their own election-winning strategies and policies amplified and fed back to them by conservative commentators and media. Without the benefit of critical analysis, a sort of la-la-land develops. Step outside the Apple-centric press and you will be deluged by the wishful thinking of anti-Apple-fanboy sentiment – you will read how Surface is going to clobber Apple; how Google is eating Apple’s lunch; that iPad was only ever a big iPod-touch… My guess is that the internal MS politics creates a megaphone which amplifies this sort of message while ignoring the stark reality of Apple’s success. The problem for Microsoft is that their entire corporate structure is built on delusional thinking, so even when Ballmer finally gets his marching orders, a new CEO who takes a stiff broom to the company will quickly find that sweeping out the dead wood will leave little behind. Talent for brown-nosing is of little use to a corporation which finds itself on its knees, but brown-nosing has been the key to success in MS for many years. One could say the same for the GOP – Paul Ryan being a case in point, voted the biggest brown-noser by his fellow students in his graduation yearbook. Belief in your own values is essential to success, but only if you have good values. Microsoft, like the GOP, finds itself hoisted on a petard of their own making, saddled with values that simply don’t resonate with the target audience.
Please don’t shine the light of truth too strongly on Balmer. I want him to be there ‘for as long as it takes’.
@ electro: Right. I knew Bob Muglia, the former head of Servers and Tools, and he was given the boot by Ballsy. This was the boss of one of two profitable divisions, which was (and still is) going strong. Yet Ballsy continues to play Captain Smith to Microsoft’s Titanic.
You are the first person who recognized my cryptic handle as electro.
🙂
All I did was click your name to see your web site, where all was revealed!
I especially enjoy all the breathless press reports preceding release of the Surface which predicted the huge market share the Surface would capture.
The ARM based Microsoft Tablet was always going to be marginal at best (a total flop at worst) just as I predicted when Microsoft claimed they were going to do an ARM based OS. Thus the ARM based Surface has been a near total flop.
We’ll have to wait to see what happens with the Intel based Surface tablets. They *may* do better as I’d expect Microsoft to be in to medium to large enterprises and extremely strongly pushing the Intel based variant of Surface. Their pitch is that this is a tablet that will easily integrate into the rest of their Windows based world. They are strongly pitching that enterprises won’t have to work hard to integrate iOS or Android based tablets. They already run Windows servers and Windows desktops/laptops. Including Windows (Intel based Windows so it’s “the same”) tablets should be a snap. It will be interesting to see how many they convince of this.
Since the Intel based Surface tablets are expected to ship by the end of January 2013, it will be interesting to see what delivery figures for the Intel based Surface will be by mid to late February.
@shadowself — thank you for reminding us that the Surface Pro will be out next month, built upon M$ decade of experience with tablets, the Courier, big a** table, and Surface RT. How will it perform? I predict: “Apples don’t fall far from the tree.” 😉
More like “lemons don’t fall far from the tree”…
This all might be true, but in typical Microsoft fashion, they trip themselves even before they walk. They *might* have had success with the Intel Surface had they released it first. Everything works across the platform. Good press. Useful for Office slaves. Wheee. Then release RT for those who want a *light* version. But this isn’t what they did and its never what they do. They work in reverse order because they are always responding to someone else’s success or idea, not generating their own. The lack of half a brain to see the failure in their strategy is just part of a whole big ball of fail at today’s Microsoft.
I predict interest and sales of Windows based tablets will get a small push when the Surface Pro is released, then slide back down to where they are now.
There are Windows based tablets on the market now. They aren’t selling. There just isn’t any interest in them. Just as there wasn’t any interest in UMPCs. Unless you redesign the interface, productivity goes down as screen sizes shrink. These window-based operating systems – and the applications that run on them – have spent the last 10 years expanding the desktop onto bigger monitors… They just aren’t designed for small screens.
So the Surface hasn’t clicked.
The truly abject reality is that the Surface may not sell well even through the new retail channels—and if that happens, maybe Microsoft’s next step is to set up a cross-country tour with a decorated van full of their prized slates.
The air was electric with excitement last year with the rollout of the “Amateur Hour is Over” Blackberry PlayBook tour. That campaign didn’t quite turn things around for Research in Motion, but Microsoft, so good at learning from others’ mistakes, can try it.
If the Surface were a car:
You aren’t kidding . . . This was their prototype answer to the magic mouse (well, okay, maybe not . . . But still funny):
LMAO
Looks like Balmer is already working on Surface tablet 2.0!
Saw one today at Staples while buying a laser toner.
POS.
OEMs shouldn’t worry, since nobody is buying the POS anyways, and putting it at worst buy isn’t gonna do anything.
I’m beginning to worry about M$ and I don’t want them to fail. Somebody has to make crappy versions of Apple products so the idiots will have something to buy, but maybe Chrome will fill that hole.
People have said MS can afford all these consumer product disasters because their other products rake in lots of money. But those will not be enough to keep investors mollified much longer, because this company’s stock has been range-bound for a dozen years (after getting cut in half) and the yield is only 3+%.