Microsoft Surface RT

» see microsoft.com/surface as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the eulogy ~

i remember the surface rt write-down hitting tech news while i was scrolling donanimhaber. microsoft had announced a nine-hundred-million-dollar charge against its consumer hardware business and the headline number was funny in the way that big corporate numbers are funny when you are an engineer reading them from the outside. nine hundred million for a tablet that did not sell. the device itself had not really made it to turkey in any visible way. you saw one in the corner of a tech-news roundup, never on someone's desk.

microsoft launched surface rt on october 26 2012, the same day windows 8 went on sale. the hardware was a clean magnesium slab with a kickstand and the new magnetic keyboard cover, which was the part of the design that actually worked. the software was windows rt, an arm-compiled version of windows 8 that ran the new windows store apps and a desktop version of microsoft office, but could not run any of the win32 desktop applications that windows users expected. a windows machine that did not run windows software was a hard sell.

by july 2013 microsoft cut the price thirty percent worldwide and announced the nine-hundred-million-dollar write-down. surface 2 in october 2013 carried windows rt 8.1 and underperformed about the same. january 2015 effectively ended windows rt as a product line. the surface brand itself survived under panos panay's leadership and pivoted to full intel processors with surface pro, which became microsoft's actual successful tablet line. the rt branch was buried.

~ the dossier ~

~ the rt problem ~

windows rt was the wrong middle. it was not full windows, since it could not run desktop applications. it was also not a clean tablet os, since the desktop was still there carrying the file explorer and the control panel. the windows store at launch had a few hundred apps, none of them the ones the average user opened daily. people who wanted a tablet were already buying ipads, and people who wanted a windows machine were buying ones with intel chips that could actually run their existing software. surface rt sat in between, expensive and unable to do either job well.

~ the write-down ~

q4 fy2013 was the quarter the rt loss hit microsoft's books. nine hundred million dollars charged against the consumer hardware unit, declared publicly in the earnings release. for a company microsoft's size it was a one-quarter dent, but it was a clean public number that branded surface rt as a failure for the rest of its life. price cuts followed. the rt inventory got dumped through fire-sale promotions and surface 2 inherited the rest.

~ the inheritance ~

everything microsoft learned from rt went into surface pro. the rebuild swapped arm for intel x86 and dropped the windows store-only restriction so the machine ran real desktop windows. the magnesium chassis and the magnetic keyboard cover carried over. surface pro 3 in 2014 was the version that actually sold, and the surface brand became microsoft's profitable hardware line for the next decade. the price of getting there was nine hundred million dollars and a dead operating system.

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