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Meanwhile, Sony is leaving the OEM business, Dell is restructuring, HP can’t decide whether to sell or not; Acer is barely afloat; only Lenovo seems to be

Meanwhile, Sony is leaving the OEM business, Dell is restructuring, HP can’t decide whether to sell or not; Acer is barely afloat; only Lenovo seems to be prospering (and now Surface Pro is aimed directly at their Thinkpad lineup). When you consider the original goals, none of which have been met, and the original dangers, all of which have come to pass, the only conclusion is that Surface is a failure. Microsoft's OEMs are keenly interested in leaving the low-margin PC business for greener pastures. Of course they are: inventory and market diversity are the horrors of their industry. If they push new hardware too hard, they devalue their inventory. They have to maintain inventory levels because they can't afford to have their competitor's eat their lunch. That is, capitalism works and it was a race to the bottom. I doubt any of the companies mentioned there have a supply chain as efficient as Apple's. To Jobs' credit, his protege was the supply chain guy. Steve knew that living in the margins isn't viable when you're directly selling your own stuff. Lenovo is privileged as their company was a supply chain company. Until they owned the logos that go on your computer, they owned all the parts underneath or figured out how to put them together. Seems natural they're doing better than most. This supply chain company eating the company that puts the logos on is important for what comes next. So the curious conclusion: kill the Surface. Kill the Surface because it didn't meet its stated goals - I disagree. Kill the Surface because it didn't save the consumer PC industry - I disagree. Welp. It sounds like the conclusion is to kill one of the only things the consumer PC industry has going for it. If they kill the Surface, it means they're going to rely on Lenovo to make the only handhelds that consumers want a Windows logo on. This article seems to suggest that Nadella or his strategy team see this all. I don't know if they do. This article also seems to suggest they've seen this and said, "Yes, I like the relationship the operating system company Google has with its OEM, Samsung." Which strikes me as delirious thinking at best. I can't imagine Google is happy to have Samsung eating Android's lunch and subsuming the Google logo, or Nadella thinking that is an enviable model for the future of Microsoft.

rayiner 12y ago
> It sounds like the conclusion is to kill one of the only things the consumer PC industry has going for it. Seriously. Surface Pro 3 is the first Windows machine I'll be buying since a Dell I bought for college in 2002. It's the only thing remotely exciting to me in PC-land. I don't know if it'll be commercially viable, but it's the only standout in the race-to-the-bottom PC industry.
- dublinben 12y ago
  Have you seen the XPS 13 or the Thinkpad Yoga? They're both pretty compelling laptops, and easily stand out from the crowded mass of plastic junk notebooks.
  - pmelendez 12y ago
    I am not too impressed by the XPS 13. But the Thinkpad Yoga and the Yoga 2 Pro are actually amazing machines (the later one has an even higher-than-retina display resolution. But again that is Lenovo and the PC world kinda need another player in the competition.
  - com2kid 12y ago
    The Yoga line is quite nice, and Lenovo seems to have wised up and simplified their SKUs (IIRC there used to be over 5 lines of laptops called "Yoga"). I have a Yoga 2 Pro, I love this high DPI 3200x1600 screen. It is amazing to read on, to the point I am willing to put up with a million other small compromises. But I'd really love it if it had a TPM chip (it has Pro in its name, it should!) or a real digitizer. A Wacom Digitizer on a 3200x1600 screen? Drawing would be beautiful. The Yoga 2 Pro was 999 when I bought it, although the price seems to have gone up by a fair bit. Also they had supply issues (now apparently resolved, Orange was on a month back order when I was looking to buy!) The Surface 3 is actually almost a perfect replacement for this machine. The resolution isn't quite as nice, but it is thinner and almost as powerful. (The 4GB of RAM thing is not good, 8GB is almost a minimum just for heavy web browsing these days...) Asus also makes some really nice hardware. Their ultrabook line is amazing, I am sad that they messed up their marketing of their one ultrabook a couple years back that had a discrete GPU in it. (It was only available through Amazon!!)
  - mikevm 12y ago
    The reason tablets appeal to me is that a large part of my time is spent on reading technical books and documents, and in those times I really want the keyboard to just go away. The Surface Pro 3 has the screen size I was dreaming about on a tablet and it seems like a tablet you can use for work, and not just for play. The one thing that disappointed me was 8GB upper bound on RAM. These things should really start at 8GB and go up to 16GB nowdays.

rayiner 12y ago

> It sounds like the conclusion is to kill one of the only things the consumer PC industry has going for it. Seriously. Surface Pro 3 is the first Windows machine I'll be buying since a Dell I bought for college in 2002. It's the only thing remotely exciting to me in PC-land. I don't know if it'll be commercially viable, but it's the only standout in the race-to-the-bottom PC industry.

dublinben 12y ago
Have you seen the XPS 13 or the Thinkpad Yoga? They're both pretty compelling laptops, and easily stand out from the crowded mass of plastic junk notebooks.
- pmelendez 12y ago
  I am not too impressed by the XPS 13. But the Thinkpad Yoga and the Yoga 2 Pro are actually amazing machines (the later one has an even higher-than-retina display resolution. But again that is Lenovo and the PC world kinda need another player in the competition.
- com2kid 12y ago
  The Yoga line is quite nice, and Lenovo seems to have wised up and simplified their SKUs (IIRC there used to be over 5 lines of laptops called "Yoga"). I have a Yoga 2 Pro, I love this high DPI 3200x1600 screen. It is amazing to read on, to the point I am willing to put up with a million other small compromises. But I'd really love it if it had a TPM chip (it has Pro in its name, it should!) or a real digitizer. A Wacom Digitizer on a 3200x1600 screen? Drawing would be beautiful. The Yoga 2 Pro was 999 when I bought it, although the price seems to have gone up by a fair bit. Also they had supply issues (now apparently resolved, Orange was on a month back order when I was looking to buy!) The Surface 3 is actually almost a perfect replacement for this machine. The resolution isn't quite as nice, but it is thinner and almost as powerful. (The 4GB of RAM thing is not good, 8GB is almost a minimum just for heavy web browsing these days...) Asus also makes some really nice hardware. Their ultrabook line is amazing, I am sad that they messed up their marketing of their one ultrabook a couple years back that had a discrete GPU in it. (It was only available through Amazon!!)
- mikevm 12y ago
  The reason tablets appeal to me is that a large part of my time is spent on reading technical books and documents, and in those times I really want the keyboard to just go away. The Surface Pro 3 has the screen size I was dreaming about on a tablet and it seems like a tablet you can use for work, and not just for play. The one thing that disappointed me was 8GB upper bound on RAM. These things should really start at 8GB and go up to 16GB nowdays.