It’s clear by now to everyone that the Surface RT has been a failure. The first Windows tablet to run on the ARM platform, the Surface RT was doomed to obscurity when people realized they could not run legacy Windows applications on the device and had to rely on ARM-only apps from the Windows Store.
That wouldn’t have been such a bad thing had the Windows Store taken off, but it didn’t. And then there were the performance issues pointed out in practically every review. So it’s not a surprise then that the Surface RT failed. But just how big a failure was it? $900 million failure, apparently.
According to Microsoft’s fiscal Q4 2013 earnings, which were pretty positive overall, there was one black mark in the form of a $900 million loss caused due to Surface RT ‘inventory adjustment’. Basically, Microsoft overestimated the demand for the tablet and, according to The Verge, ended up producing close to three to five million Surface RT tablets, whereas close one million were actually sold. To put things in perspective, Apple sold close to 20 million iPads in the second fiscal quarter.
Clearly, then, the Surface RT was not a smart bet for Microsoft. The company has recently slashed prices on the tablet but it remains to be seen if it manages to attract buyers or will just be a case of too little, too late.
Source : blog[dot]gsmarena[dot]com
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