The Surface RT Isn’t Selling So Well ⇥ neowin.net

Tom Warren of The Verge has a source who attended Microsoft’s town hall meeting earlier this week:

“We built a few more devices than we could sell,” admitted Ballmer when referring to the slow Surface RT sales.

A few? Microsoft took a $900 million writedown for the poor sales of the Surface RT.

Brad Sams of Neowin also has a source from that town hall meeting:

As for the next Surface? The device is currently in testing and will feature ‘typical improvements’ which is likely a spec bump. Internal response to the next gen Surface has been positive.

That’s not encouraging.

The Surface RT has always seemed like a confused product to me. It runs an OS that looks identical to the one on the Surface Pro and on any Windows laptop sold in the last year, but it’s nowhere near the same.

It would be like if there were two versions of the iPad, with an OS that looks exactly like OS X. On one model of the iPad, you’d be able to install the full desktop version of iPhoto; on the other, you’d have to install the iOS version. Madness.