“We built a few more devices than we could sell,” admitted Ballmer when referring to the slow Surface RT sales. Microsoft recently cut the price of its Surface RT tablets by 30 percent worldwide, and Ballmer and Turner reiterated in the internal meeting that the huge writedown was a price adjustment that was necessary to sell Surface RT devices. While Ballmer didn’t provide a sneak peek at the next Surface, we’re told he confirmed new devices are currently being tested with incremental improvements.

So Microsoft took a $900 million writedown because the Surface RT sucks balls and in response the next version of the Surface will have “incremental improvements.” Perfect.

UPDATE: I updated the headline and post to better reflect Ballmer was talking about the Surface RT.