I start by asking the question: Who would want a Surface?
Before I get very far, I ask another question: What are the groups who would want (or not want) a Surface tablet?
I divide the market into three groups: the fanboys, the haters, and the pragmatists.
The Microsoft fans are the people who dig in to anything that Microsoft produces. They would buy a Surface (and probably already have).
Fanboy groups are not limited to Microsoft. There are fanboys for Apple. There are fanboys for Linux (and Android, and Blackberry...).
Just as there are fans for each of the major vendors, there are also the haters. There is the "Anyone But Microsoft" crowd. They will not be buying the Surface. If anything, they will go out of their way to buy another product. (There are also "Anyone But Apple" and "Anything But Linux" crowds, too.)
In between these groups are the pragmatists. They buy technology not because they like it but because it works, it is popular, and it is low-risk. For desktops and servers, they have purchased Microsoft technologies over other technologies -- by large margins.
The pragmatists are the majority. The fanboys and the haters are fringe groups. Vocal, perhaps, but small populations within the larger set.
It was not always this way.
In the pre-PC days, people were fanboys for hardware: the Radio Shack TRS-80, the Apple II, the Commodore 64... even the Timex Sinclair had fans. Microsoft was hardware-neutral: Microsoft BASIC ran on just about everything. Microsoft was part of the "rebel alliance" against big, expensive mainframe computers.
This loyalty continued in the PC-DOS era. With the PC, the empire of IBM was clearly present in the market. Microsoft was still viewed as "on our side".
Things changed with Windows and Microsoft's expansion into the software market. After Microsoft split Windows from OS/2 and started developing primary applications for Windows, it was Microsoft that became the empire. Microsoft's grinding competition destroyed Digital Research, Borland, Wordperfect, Netscape, and countless other companies -- and we saw Microsoft as the new evil. Microsoft was no longer one of "us".
Fanboys care if a vendor is one of "us"; pragmatists don't. Microsoft worked very hard to please the pragmatists, focussing on enterprise software and corporate customers. The result was that the pragmatist market share increased at the expense of the fanboys. (The "Anyone But Microsoft" crowd picked up some share, too.)
Over the years the pragmatists have served Microsoft well. Microsoft dominated the desktop market and had a large share of the server market. While Microsoft danced with the pragmatists, the fanboys migrated to other markets: Blackberry, Apple, Linux. Talk with Microsoft users and they generally fall into three categories: people who pick Microsoft products for corporate use, people who use Microsoft products because the job forces them to, or people who use Microsoft products at home because that is what came with the computer. Very few people go out of their way to purchase Microsoft products. (No one is erasing Linux and installing Windows.)
Microsoft's market base is pragmatists.
Pragmatists are a problem for Microsoft: they are only weakly loyal. Pragmatists are, well, pragmatic. They don't buy a vendors technology because they like the vendor. They buy technology to achieve specific goals (perhaps running a company). They tend to follow the herd and buy what other folks buy. The herd is not buying Surface tablets, especially Surface RT tablets.
Microsoft destroyed the fanboy market base. Or perhaps I should say "their fanboy market base", as Apple has retained (and grown) theirs.
Without a sufficiently large set of people willing to take chances with new technologies, a vendor is condemned to their existing product designs (or mild changes).
For Microsoft to sell tablets, they need fanboys.
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