Dampened Sales Figures for Microsoft’s Surface Tablet

According to Bloomberg, around 1.5 million Surface tablets have been sold so far, which is much less than the figure expected.

Just over one million Surface RT tablets were sold by Redmond, Washington-based Microsoft since November, and the number of Surface Windows 8 Pros sold since February is 400,000. The sources reporting to Bloomberg stated that around 3 million Surface RT units have been ordered by Microsoft.

Best Buy, Staples and Microsoft are amongst the few retailers who are able to sell the Surface product; they are not purchasable via the channel, and this raises issues for a lot of solution providers who want to sell the device on to their customers.

The principal and managing partner at Greenville, S.C.-based solution provider Intelli-NET, Derek Davis, states that Microsoft has made a mistake in advertising the Surface tablet as an entertainment device.

He said: “Maybe the way they should sell it is as a way to do business in the cloud. I want a tool to do as much as possible. If I could bust open a Word document and work, that would be great. But they're not playing that through the channel and it's being presented more as an entertainment device.”

Furthermore, Davis commented that the Surface tablet may be too “little, too late” from Microsoft. He added: “The Android and iPad have been out there for a couple years now. They're just another player in the market and just not getting a lot of traction.”

This is the second report this month that has noted low Surface sales figures. According to Forbes, Brenand Barnicle has cut his financial forecast for Microsoft in anticipation of the company selling 600,000 Surface devices in the present quarter, which is much lower than the previous expectation for Surface sales to reach 1.4 million units. Barnacle lowered his Surface forecast for the financial year from three million to one million units. (CY) Link