As Microsoft prepares to shed 18,000 employees, you’d think the company’s marketing team would be working overtime to boost income and shore up weaker products. Instead, it doesn’t appear that any lessons have been learned from the ongoing failure of the Surface.<\/p>\n
Now in a\u00a0previous round of Surface ads, Microsoft touted the ability to run Office and Skype, forgetting, or ignoring the fact that you could also do both on a\u00a0Mac or an iPad. So where’s the advantage? Besides, the consumers\u00a0that Microsoft was targeting would care about the latter more than the former. In addition to Macs and iPads,\u00a0they could also run Skype on an iPhone or an Android phone, not to mention Windows Phone. So?<\/p>\n
In other words, if a company is touting something as advantage, make sure it’s an advantage. It’s not an advantage to mention a product or service that the competition also has. It just coneys the impression\u00a0that, in this case at least, Microsoft must think potential customers of the Surface 3 aren’t very smart.<\/p>\n
More to the point, are those advantages relevant to the target audience? Now flashy TV ads would tend to impact consumers. If you want to reach the IT market, maybe go to Computerworld or a similar enterprise-oriented publication. Consumers may care about Skype, but not so much about Microsoft Office, unless it’s needed at work, but it’s\u00a0not considered a sexy feature by any means.<\/p>\n
Microsoft, as their marketing team probably expected, got some attention from the Mac media for the latest series of ads touting the Surface 3. Typical of previous campaigns, though, Microsoft doesn’t quite get the audience they’re trying to reach, which continues to explain why the Surface tablets have failed in the marketplace.<\/p>\n
This time, Microsoft is presenting\u00a0the Surface 3 as a slightly costlier\u00a0\u2014\u00a0but superior\u00a0\u2014\u00a0alternative to the MacBook Air. So after the Windows critics attacked Apple for selling overpriced gear\u00a0\u2014\u00a0the alleged “Apple Tax”\u00a0\u2014\u00a0now we have a product that, with optional\u00a0keyboard, is more expensive than an Apple note-book. So the question is why?<\/p>\n
It’s certainly not more powerful than the MacBook Air, so what is there that you can’t live without?<\/p>\n
Well, it seems that Microsoft is still pushing the tablet trope that has gone nowhere for well over a decade. Although slimmer and lighter than most PC equivalents, Microsoft has clearly learned no lessons. So the Surface 3 is better than a MacBook Air because it has\u00a0a touchscreen, a stylus and a detachable keyboard. Well, actually it’s an attachable keyboard because the core product doesn’t have one.<\/p>\n
A stylus?<\/p>\n
The stylus and the touchscreen have been part of every single failed Windows tablet for years. As I’ve mentioned in the past, our\u00a0former family doctor had a network of those tablets, a thick old Toshiba, which actually hampered entry and retrieval of patient information. I still remember watching him\u00a0and his assistants combing through complex interfaces to manage a patient visit. I expect it actually made the visits take longer, hence the doctor made less money, since the prices charged were the same as other physicians. In the end, he moved his practice to a member-only scheme, where you pay an annual fee in addition to the price of the office visits.<\/p>\n
I would not assume the change was due to the harm caused by using inefficient convertible note-books.<\/p>\n
One thing has been clear, though, and that is that convertible note-books haven’t done a lot for the PC market. Indeed, the success story this past quarter was the traditional desktop minitower, largely because businesses are rushing to upgrade\u00a0their computers in the wake of Microsoft’s decision to end support for Windows XP. Old systems that won’t work efficiently with Windows 7 had to be replaced. Once that replacement cycle is finished, perhaps PC sales will return to the doldrums.<\/p>\n
As one blogger suggested, Microsoft isn’t going to persuade many MacBook Air owners that the clunky Surface 3 is a superior alternative. They might persuade other PC users, at the expense of competing with OEMs. Of course, Microsoft has never been above competing with OEMs in the past, so that would be nothing new.<\/p>\n
But now that the targets for Microsoft’s corporate blood letting have been identified \u2014 and they appear to be mostly employees of Nokia’s handset division \u2014 perhaps the next task\u00a0would be to get the marketing division working full-time to identify the correct markets and demand for a device or service, and to do their level best to expand those markets.<\/p>\n
Trying to pigeonhole an existing product into a category in which it doesn’t fit isn’t going to magically move millions of copies of the Surface 3 into the hands of customers. Revisiting old, failed strategies isn’t going to help either.<\/p>\n
For the future, I gather Microsoft is hoping that Windows 9 will help people forget the stench of Windows 8, perhaps the worst OS failure in the company’s history. But the early feature set seems a throwback. The desktop interface will get greater emphasis, there will be a redone Start menu, and the addition of virtual desktops. But OS X and Linux users have been taking advantage of virtual desktops for several years. There have been third party alternatives for Windows, too, so adding native support would be a useful feature, but hardly unique, and hardly worth the upgrade from Windows 8 \u2014 or Windows 7 for that matter.<\/p>\n
In contrast, take a look at the immense feature set for OS X Yosemite. If Microsoft manages a tenth of what Apple is offering, Windows boosters\u00a0will tout that as a significant development.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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