Windows Surface - Fading to Black ?

IDC recently released their data on Tablet sales for Q4 and all of 2017 and while the overall market shrank around 8% to around 49.6M units, MS's Surface line sale fell some 19% and dropped MS from the top 5 vendors.  With only 748,000 units sold in Q4 and just about 3M sold for all of 2017 - MS's market share is some where around 1.5%

Compared to market leader Apple which sold 13.2M iPads in Q4 alone and some 44M in 2017 with a market share of 26.8% - iPad outsells Surface at nearly an 18:1 ratio. 

So what's happening ?  

As we all know the original concept of the Surface was to promote a new personal computing paradigm that focused on high portability with good computing power and graphics along with touch and pen based input methods.  

MS's goal was to create a platform that OEMs would want to emulate and try and boost overall PC sales which have been dropping now for 6 years in a row.  

And so while the OEMs did take some Surface concepts and turned them into products lines - the reality has been different.  

While a lot of enthusiasts initially bought in - and I know a lot of them - it has been a love/hate relationship with the devices.  MS themselves have struggled to get their Windows 10 OS to work properly and the platforms has experienced all sorts of issues with power mgmt, firmware & driver issues and more.  In fact I argue that too much of Windows 10 was "Surface focused".  

There are also a whole new group of alternative platforms.  From iPad Pro to various Android based devices from Samsung, Amazon, Huawei and Lenovo which are the top five in sales.  

And while yes folks can argue that these are not real PCs because they don't run a traditional OS like Windows - the reality is for many use cases you don't need it.  

Personally my next "laptop" may be a Pixel Book as I can do effectively everything I need for work / play in a device that's fast, easier to maintain and has dramatically longer battery life.

And even though there is a potential new wave of Windows based systems based on ARM CPUs - MS has not announced a Surface branded version - instead relying on HP, Asus and Lenovo to take the first plunge.  

As I've stated several times - the challenge that MS faces with Surface is that they really aren't a hardware company.  Sure they have XBox - but MS really doesn't have the resource focus or will to become a hardware leader in the PC space.  

If MS has another year or two of sales drops in the 18 - 20% range it wouldn't surprise me at all if MS retires the Surface line.  

While you can argue that Surface did accomplish it's goal of influencing the major OEMS to up their designs to support MS's "Modern OS" - from a market perspective it did not change the overall market trajectory for PCs and now the Surface line itself is fading to black.

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