Jason Perlow is a technologist with over two decades of experience with integrating large heterogeneous multi-vendor computing environments in Fortune 500 companies. He is Senior Technology Editor at ZDNet.
“Maybe I’m just cranky because I had to work a 12-hour day, waiting for an event to finish on West Coast time when I really just wanted to take my wife out to dinner instead,” Jason Perlow writes for ZDNet. “But Microsoft’s new Surface tablet still has catastrophe written all over it.”
“Absolutely nothing was said about price or availability. Only that the Windows RT/ARM version will ship around Windows 8 RTM timeframe, and the Pro/Intel version will ship 3 months after that,” Perlow writes. “So let me get this straight, Microsoft. You made journalists schlep across the country, no, the planet, for a product that might not ship for months? You’re lucky they didn’t burn the venue down.”
“Okay, no ship date, no prices and… no compelling 3rd-party applications or even Office to show on it whatsoever,” Perlow writes. “So we have no idea how well it performs, and how well supported it will be by 3rd-party software developers. No partnerships to speak of. Nada.”
MacDailyNews Take: As we wrote about “Surface,” in part, last night: “It’s all still just vapor. No prices. No shipping date(s). No actual sizes and weights. No nothing.”
Perlow writes, “Right now, Microsoft’s OEMs — with the exception of whatever ‘lucky’ company got the nod to do the contract manufacturing for this product — must be absolutely livid. To produce their own ARM and x86 Windows 8 systems, they have to pay exorbitant licensing fees. Windows RT is going to cost an estimated $85 per copy to your average OEM. A Windows 8 Professional license on x86 will be considerably more. I don’t care what the hell Microsoft says about partners having cost and feature parity, that’s $85 of pure margin advantage that Microsoft has and the OEM doesn’t.”
“All of this reeks of suicidal thinking from a company that wants to deep six its long-established manufacturer ecosystem,” Perlow writes. “It does not reflect the actions of a company that tried so hard to shed long-held industry perceptions of being a monopolist, and worst case, it could potentially re-ignite federal antitrust activity that Microsoft has spent more than ten years digging itself out of.”
Read more in the full article here.
Related article:
Microsoft previews own ‘Surface’ tablet – June 18, 2012
Microsoft touts ‘major’ June 18 event said to showcase Windows RT tablets – June 15, 2012
ZDNet’s Kingsley-Hughes: Microsoft’s Windows 8 is an awful, horrible, painful design disaster – June 8, 2012
Analyst meets with big computer maker, finds ‘general lack of enthusiasm’ for Windows 8 – June 8, 2012
Dvorak: Windows 8 an unmitigated disaster; unusable and annoying; it makes your teeth itch – June 3, 2012
The Guardian: Microsoft’s Windows 8 is confusing as hell; an appalling user experience – March 5, 2012
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