Microsoft Takes a “Massive Gamble” with the Surface Tablet

Microsoft’s Surface is enjoying a terrific success since the company officially revealed pricing info on it, but that’s not at all a good thing.

At least, this is how a Microsoft supply chain official sees the whole Surface tablet saga.

Talking to ITpro, an insider of the Microsoft supply chain who requested anonymity said that Microsoft is actually taking a “massive gamble” with the tablet without even knowing it.

Basically, he thinks that releasing the Surface together with the Windows 8 operating system may actually confuse consumers because they may think that they’re allowed to run traditional desktop apps on their tablets.

“No-one’s telling the consumer that, if they buy the Surface RT, it will only run Microsoft [Metro-style] applications and there aren’t that many of them available,” he told the aforementioned source.

This may after all affect sales of the Surface Pro that’s slated to hit the shelves in a few months. Consumers could be so disappointed with the Surface RT that they might avoid buying the Pro version, the insider explained.

“I think [Microsoft] is making a mistake by launching RT first, because users will buy it, realise it doesn’t do anything and that will put other people off buying the full blown [Pro] version.”

The problem however isn’t necessarily the fact that Microsoft doesn’t explain clearly that Surface isn’t able to run desktop apps, but the fact that its employees know almost nothing about the device they’re about to sell very soon.

An experiment performed by the editors over at The Verge revealed that Microsoft is yet to train its staff on the Surface tablet, so the information its workers provides is quite inaccurate.

Windows 8 and Windows RT “are pretty much the same thing, there is no real huge difference beside the RT is more touch-friendly,” one of the employees said.