Today, as part of its Q4 earnings report, Microsoft announced that it has incurred a $900 million loss due to its struggling Surface RT tablet. While the company otherwise reported $4.97 billion in earnings from $19.9 billion in revenue, the Surface RT cost the company a significant sum as a result of "inventory adjustments."

The news comes on the heels of Microsoft's $150 price drop on the Surface RT, now carrying a $349 MSRP for the 32GB model and $449 for the 64GB version. While Microsoft has not released specific sales statistics, IDC figures for Q1 placed Surface sales at under a million, with the Surface Pro accounting for a majority of total units sold.

Based on a stripped down version of Windows 8 and running apps optimized for touchscreen interfaces, the Surface RT acts as Microsoft's alternative to the iPad and Android-based tablets. However, with a limited array of compatible apps and the Surface Pro offering a far greater level of versatility, the Surface RT has struggled to find an audience.

http://www.ign.com/articles/2013/07/18/microsoft-lost-900-million-on-surface-rt-in-q1

wow didnt know it performed this bad. if this isnt called a flop i dont know what is.

Theres a lot of better tablets out there. I guess all those billions wont guarantee success.

A $900m writedown doesn't mean a $900m loss.

The problem with that is that you could justify MS doing ANYTHING, no matter how little sense it makes, because the background revenue from just being Microsoft will cause quarterly profits anyway. MS could hand out $900m of cheeseburgers on street corners and it'd be OK.

The important message from this writedown is that certain people and departments within Microsoft have no idea what they're doing or what the market wants. If these people are promoted within the Windows division, eventually the background revenue will be under threat. There will come a time when a Windows device isn't necessary in every house or office.

Honestly I'd buy a pro, but just not at those prices.

None of their experiments have net profited. Not even Xbox.

Its a flop and there's no way to spin it

xbox? zune? surface RT? kin? ps3? vita? virtual boy? why would i care? you seem to think everybody takes these stuff to heart like you do. seriously, chill

well for that it would need an viable alternative first.... and non of the commercial OS competing with MS are anywhere close to that....

MS could completely crash win 8 and still be fine for a decade if not more.... apple has nothing business viable to offer any IT that goes apple should be fired for wasting capital investment and resources.... only a few fields can justify the higher price in a business set up.... google is a joke when it commes to business application.... and well linux could be a nice option but that's not happening and maintenance is costly usually....

now on office soft....apple work and google docks are just nowhere close to compete with MS office.... you have open office but I really don't consider it on par, yet it's one of the closest contestant.... but still you'd need a major shift because there is huge compatibilty issues with MS office with complex options such as graphs and all.... I know I got 20% off of a grade when I was a student because the teacher couldn't see a graph on excel from an oppenoffice doc....

then you have servers, cloud, and all the services MS has.... all the win CE kernel they put in just about anything from missiles to cars.....


so the day with no MS is nowhere close to happen.... heck even win8 with a major PC decline is on track to take over the last 3 OSX distribution combine marketshare probably before the end of next quarter....

and people can complain all they want, and I agree there are a lot of work to be done on win8.... but to me it is the only viable future proof ready OS.... the only that is suited for almost any device that will come in the future.... hybrids being the sweet spot.... but with the desktop integration it can suite any work PC aswell as any tablet PC and phones or even a console.... so yeah tweaks are needed but so far to me apple is trailing behind in innovation... and well chrome OS is the trendy but shitty stolen version of linux....

so yeah I will stick with MS and many other people as long as there isn't any better and viable alternatives.....