Microsoft Surface tablets not selling as expected

The Redmond based software giant, Microsoft, had expected to grab a good slice of the growing tablet market with the release of the Microsoft Surface tablets. The company had expected to see a good number of tablets, but that has not turned out to be true. The company has been said to have sold only about 1.5 million Microsoft Surface tablets since the launch of the tablets.

And this 1.5 million tablet sale includes a little over a million Surface RT tablets and around 400, 000 Surface Pro tablets. And this info comes directly from three people who are aware of the sales records of the company but have asked not to be named. Brent Thill, an analyst at the UBS AG, had predicted that the Redmond based tech giant would be selling 2 million tablets of the Surface brand within the Dec. 2012 time frame itself. But three months after that, the company has still not sold so many. Bloomberg writes:

The poor reception for Surface, unveiled last year, adds to challenges facing Microsoft’s Windows unit, which brings in a quarter of the company’s revenue. The devices are Microsoft’s first direct attempt to grab a slice of the surging market for tablets, seeking to take on Google Inc. and Apple Inc. and prove that Windows has a place in a world of touch screens and smartphone applications. That hasn’t happened so far, said Alex Gauna, an analyst at JMP Securities LLC in San Francisco.

“It’s pretty clear that things were bad entering the year, and at least for the moment they’re getting worse,” Gauna said. “The path to a successful Surface, in the same way that they were successful with Xbox, is not very clear to me right now.”

It might not be so easy to take on Google and Apple’s success in the tablet and the smart phone world after all. Even though Android has a good market share, there is a very good chance that ecosystem may soon drop down.

Source: Bloomberg