At last, Microsoft is starting to sell Surface RT the right way

A $900 million "adjustment", pointing at several million unsold units sitting in warehouses somewhere, is probably not the way Microsoft hoped to enter the hardware market.

Sure, the company had built mice, keyboards, and games consoles before, but the Surface RT was different. It disrupted Microsoft's traditional OEM model with Redmond for the first time building something that is more or less a PC, going head-to-head with devices from its OEM partners.

When I reviewed it, Surface RT left me a bit nonplussed. It was not a bad device in the way that the Acer Iconia W3?was a bad device. Surface RT uses high quality materials, feels well-built, and certain aspects of its design?its keyboard covers, both the surprisingly effective Touch Cover, and the just plain good Type Cover; its aesthetics; the integrated kickstand?were smart and thoughtful.

But as a complete package, it just didn't make sense. It was a touch-based tablet, but it forced you to use the touch-hostile Windows desktop for some tasks. It ran Windows, but it couldn't run any Windows apps, except the one built-in: Office. It ran Office, but it didn't have Outlook, and you couldn't use it for commercial purposes without a separate license. Even with this Office license, it couldn't join Windows domains. Its Metro environment offered a solid, if incomplete, touch user interface, but it had few apps.

Microsoft argued that it was an uncompromised best of both worlds device: a PC and a tablet.

I can see how it could have been that. With a rounded out Office suite, Active Directory participation, and commercial usage rights, it might have been a viable PC and a good fit for, say, mobile road warriors: full strength Office (including, with the HDMI port, the ability to connect to projectors), cast iron security, all-day battery life, in a lightweight package.

With a more complete ecosystem of Metro applications?and, especially, if Microsoft's built-in Mail, Music, and Video apps had been better?and a Metro environment that didn't have the desktop dependency, it might have been viable as "just a tablet."

But as it was, it was only part of a PC and only part of a tablet.

Even that might have been acceptable if the price had been right. Make it a spur of the moment purchase, and people can find a niche for it. Strong sales would no doubt induce developers to address the shortage of Metro apps, too. But it wasn't a spur of the moment purchase. The Surface RT started at $499 for a 32 GB unit with no keyboard cover. That put it squarely up against the iPad, or the Google Nexus 10 that came out within a few weeks of the Surface RT's launch.

Both of those tablets had faster processors, better screens, and most importantly, far more applications than the Surface RT.

Why are these people dancing, and what does it have to do with a tablet?

To top it all off, Microsoft's advertising had, oh, just about nothing to do with the product. It showed a bunch of people dancing around, and about the only thing you learned about Surface was that it had a keyboard that could snap on and off.

A keyboard that costs extra and doesn't ship with the $499 version.

Did it show the things that Surface could do? No. Did it show the things that Windows RT does that are actually pretty good? No. Arguably, the ads didn't even explain that Surface is a tablet computer.

What is this I don't even.

More broadly, the same was true of Windows 8 advertising in general. What does this painful looking ad tell you about Windows? Nothing.

If, in spite of all this, Surface RT was still something you wanted to buy, Microsoft made even that hard. At its launch, it was only available in a handful of Microsoft stores and online. The chance of being able to do something fairly basic, like, oh, I don't know, try one before you bought it, was slim to none, unless you lived in exactly the right part of the US. Rest of the world? Fuggeddaboutit.

With all that going for it, it's not tremendously surprising that Surface RT didn't find many people willing to buy it. A few people did, of course; IT guys who just wanted a lightweight package with a good RDP client, or students who wanted something to run Office. There's even a small demographic of haters who bought the Surface RT because they wouldn't dream of buying anything with an Apple logo or running Android.

Though the student market might be a market that could be nurtured into something larger, none of this was what you might call a recipe for success. That success should so far have eluded Microsoft is no great surprise.

The future, however, might be a little brighter. In a bid to woo that student market, Microsoft has a promotional scheme that allows schools to buy the units for $199 (or $289 with the Type Cover). For an Office and Web browsing machine that's basically immune to malware, that's a pretty compelling deal.

While it's a shame that the offer doesn't extend to students, it's nonetheless a sensible move. It's a market where Surface RT's quirky mix of features isn't so inconvenient. Outlook and macros don't matter a whole lot to kids writing up book reports or plotting simple graphs.

Redmond is also starting to tell people what Windows 8 is and does. While streaming Project Runway yesterday, er, while my wife was streaming Project Runway yesterday, we saw this ad a whole lot. It's maybe not the best ad ever made, but it makes a point: Windows 8 lets you run two apps side-by-side on your tablet, and that's actually useful. iOS doesn't.

On the hardware front, the company has been running the Siri-trolling iPad comparison ad for a few weeks now. I personally think it's a great ad. Is it fair and balanced? No, of course not. It's a skewed, biased comparison that highlights Windows 8's strengths and ignore its weaknesses. But it's fun, and I think it does a good job of highlighting the places that Microsoft has innovated, and the ways in which Windows RT devices offer, in some ways, something more than the iPad.

Up to now, the ad has always been slightly undermined by the pricing reveal at the end. Rather than comparing the iPad to Microsoft's own tablet, it resorted to comparing against Dell's Windows RT device, the XPS 10?because it's cheaper.

I lolled.

No longer. With the price cut, Surface can now star in a Siri ad of its own.

Surface RT is a lot more buyable than it ever was, too, with wider international availability, and availability beyond Microsoft's own stores. The Best Buy store-in-store approach should further the visibility of the product.

To top it all off, Windows 8.1 will update Windows RT to give the platform Outlook, filling a substantial functional gap for corporate workers. 8.1 should also deliver an improved Metro Mail app, and more generally, the store is starting to become a little more fleshed out.

Is this going to be enough to make Surface RT a belated success? Realistically: no. It's too late for that, and honestly it wouldn't surprise me to find the company shipping the devices at an even deeper discount to the first few million Xbox One buyers to emphasize the SmartGlass/tablet companion aspect.

So this has been an expensive education. It probably isn't over, either; further price cuts in the future can't be ruled out, and they'll require even more "adjustments."

It is, however, a more promising sign for the future. Wide availability, a price that makes sense, advertising that both informs and amuses, and promotions that emphasize the device's strengths: these are all things that should have been there from day one. For Surface RT, they weren't, but they give me hope that in the next Surface RT?I don't believe that Surface RT will be Microsoft's last foray into the ARM tablet market?they will be.

Listing image by TheGiantVermin

Source: http://feeds.arstechnica.com/~r/arstechnica/gadgets/~3/52ygmMawwSM/story01.htm

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