A funny thing happened on the way to the Forum…
As mentioned in my intro, Microsoft released Surface Pro earlier today.
Before long, there were reports of long lines at Microsoft Stores, and the product being sold out nationwide within hours!
I can bear testimony to the lack of availability: like me, my brother wanted a Surface Pro to replace his SurfaceRT, having found out that SurfaceRT isn’t useful to him without Outlook. He had called the Denver-area Microsoft Store last week and was told their inventory would be adequate.
Not true, it turned out to be.
His call over there today upon seeing all the noise in the blogosphere confirmed his wildest fears: he won’t be getting a Surface Pro to take with him to Lagos next week.
Now, Greg is lustily looking at my Surface Pro 128 and wondering if he could try something dangerous. He can’t. And shouldn’t.
Coming back to Surface Pro and the general lack of availability, I cannot help but be cynical.
As I tweeted today,
and
I believe my questions are valid.
For one, Microsoft is NOT a retail neophyte.
Even to the untrained eye, this moves smacks of a copying of the worst practices of Apple Computer, Inc., and is a grave injustice to all potential Surface Pro purchasers.
No one can tell me that Microsoft, after seeing how quickly SurfaceRT sold out by midday on the very day it was released, couldn’t have cranked up production and inventory to meet the anticipated demand.
This development makes the tweets by Panos Panay, the honcho for Microsoft’s Surface team about ‘visiting their manufacturing partners’ in the Orient a while back, a steaming pile of excrement!.
In retrospect, I, and everyone else, should have seen this coming when, if as rumored, Microsoft declined to take preorders for Surface Pro. At that time, it should have been obvious that Microsoft was looking to garner the sort of buzz that titillates that clowns such as that analyst Gene Muenster.
To make matters worse, and helping more cynicism, Microsoft Store online, which was out of all Surface Pro devices as of 2.00 PM yesterday, has automagically found several to sell. One has to wonder who brought that flame from Olympus, right?
Compounding it, Microsoft has released a totally equivocal, and sufficiently vague statement on this here.
As far as I am concerned, this is a contrived and thoroughly artificial product shortage that has been successful in doing what it was designed to do: create a buzz and groundswell in order to make the product look more desirous, and maybe goose sales.
In fact, without a release of actual first-day or first-weekend sales numbers by Microsoft, and not by Microsoft surrogates or apologists, I stand by my opinion here.
If I am wrong, I’ll mea culpa. Publicly.
© 2002 – 2013, John Obeto for Blackground Media Unlimited
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