Windows tablet sales

[rodan01]

Microsoft announced that Surface sales were $493 million in Q1. But, how many units sold?

Lets say that 75% of them are Surface RT with an ASP of $450 including the cover.
And 25% are Surface Pro and their accessories with an ASP of $1100.

With this assumptions we get an ASP for both devices of $612 and 800.000 units sold.

We also know that Intel sold 5 million SOCs for tablets in Q1, and 80%-90% of them are in Android tablets, only 10%-20% in Windows tablets.
Lets say 15% of the SOCs are in Windows tablets, that means 750.000 Windows tablets with Intel SOC sold in Q1 (Atom and I5).

Crossing the information we can estimate the sales of the Windows tablets by type of device:

Surface RT: 0.6 million
Surface Pro: 0.2 million
Other Intel tablets: 0.55 million

Total: 1.35 million

Apple sold 16.35 million iPads in Q1.
Android? Maybe 40 million tablets in Q1.

Other piece of information is that the cost of the surface devices was $539 million, so Microsoft is losing money with the Surface. The devices are subsidized and even with that price advantage they can't sell them.

You can change the assumptions a bit but the numbers won't change much. Windows is growing in the tablet market, but so slow an from such a small base that the platform can't escape from irrelevance.
Microsoft made many announcements at the build conference that increase the competitiveness of the platform. I think the situation will improve, but right now It looks gloomy.

 

[snowmutt]

I guess, but it wasn't too long ago Android tablets (Motorola Xoom, anyone?) had the same low sales. No fan boy-ism here, though. Those are ugly numbers.

This isn't something MS doesn't know. And let's not forget "convertables" are often linked to laptop or ultrabook sales, so there is slightly better sales then these numbers indicate. But Windows 8 is a mobile platform, and MS is long term oriented. Mobile and cloud intergration is the future, and it is almost the present. They need enterprise to embrace W8, and tablet sales will improve quickly. PC/laptop sales are not dropping as fast as the "experts" claim they have, so MS still has great cash resources to get W8 mainstream.

A little urgency sure couldn't hurt, though.

 

[rodan01]

Intel include in the tablet category detachables like the Asus T100 or the Dell Venue 11, and in the laptop category convertibles with keyboard that can't be removed like the Lenovo Yoga. So, yes, sales are really awful.

What amaze me is how disastrous was the strategy with Windows 8. This graph is from adduplex, It shows the usage of store apps by device. The Surface represent 16%-17% of the usage even though sales are almost zero. That means that people is not using store apps in laptop and desktop PCs. So, all this idea of forcing the Metro UI in the desktop PC to help the tablet's ecosystem was a mistake.



Microsoft spent 3 years building Windows 8, several billion dollars in costs and a couple of billions in marketing, and those resources were wasted, It didn't help the tablet and It sunk the desktop.
Now, they are backpedaling that effort. They are developing a new tablet OS based in Windows Phone!! and the Desktop OS is coming back to the Windows 7 UI.

This collapse is only comparable with Vista. After winning the browser wars Microsoft thought that the web was a incapable technology and all the people would adopt WPF as a better web technology, they built Windows Vista heavily based on managed code with an awful performance, and Internet explorer was forgotten. You know what happened after that, Firefox, Google, Gmail, Chrome, Ajax, Web 2.0, Facebook, etc.

And also comparable to neglecting the mobile platform.

Maybe a company can't make three huge mistake and lose 10 years of development and have any hope of surviving in such a competitive and dynamic market. They lost the web wave, they lost the mobile wave, and finally they lost a big opportunity of coming back using the strength of Windows.

I was so wrong too, when they presented Windows 8 I thought It was a brilliant idea.