> “We fought hard for iPad,” a pilot working for the airline told AppleInsider. He described the Delta deal as being about money, travel contracts, and Delta’s Information Technology staff historically being “in bed” with Microsoft.
Why would Delta want to listen to the people actually using the devices at 30,000 feet in the air.
Paul Thurrott:
> A proposed class action lawsuit has been filed against Microsoft on behalf of its shareholders, alleging that the firm lied about the financial performance of its Surface RT tablet. The surprise revelation that sales were much less than expected came months later than required by law, the suit says, and immediately “eviscerated” $34 billion of Microsoft’s market value, materially impacting shareholders.
> The suit names Microsoft as well as Steve Ballmer, Peter Klein, Frank Brod and Tami Reller as defendants.
The news for Microsoft and the Surface RT just keeps getting worse.
> “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 sucks balls and in response the next version of the Surface will have “incremental improvements.” Perfect.
Rene Ritchie:
> With these latest commercials, Microsoft shows they’re no closer to learning that lesson today than they were back with Bill Gates and the Tablet PC. They’re still mired in Windows and in Office. They’re so afraid of letting go of past success that they’ll take future failure instead. They’ll refuse to compromise on anything other than making the user experience horribly, needlessly, compromised.
That pretty much says it all.
Honestly, I’m not surprised. In the mobile market, Microsoft has proven over the years that it doesn’t know what customers want.