Steve Ballmer Admits Microsoft Made Too Many Surface Tablets

One thing is clear in the tech world recently, Microsoft are not doing well in the tablet world, their Surface device just isn’t winning people over and now it seems they’ve admitted why it’s costing them so much.

Steve Ballmer, the CEO of Microsoft has admitted that the company simply built too many Surface tablets and that Windows device sales in general haven’t been as strong as they expected.

Personally this came as little surprise to myself, I just didn’t see a place for the Windows tablet and I think this might be a part of the big wakeup call that Microsoft are getting recently, people didn’t want the Xbox One the way Microsoft intended, nor do they want Windows 8 the way Microsoft intended and the same goes for their tablet business. The market is flooded with tablets at the moment, many of which that are easier to use, cheaper or more powerful, it’s a tough market and I imagine that profit margins are getting slimmer as the market gets ever more crowded.

The write-down on the Surface RT has cost Microsoft a pricely sum of $900 million and that may not even fix the issue for them over night, so this is a game that could still go either way, but one thing is for certain, they need to shift hardware units at a competitive price.

“We built a few more devices than we could sell,” said Ballmer, referring to weak Surface RT sales. The Microsoft CEO added that the recent 30% price reduction was required to improve sales.

“We’re not selling as many Windows devices as we want to,” added the chief exec, referring to phones, tablets and PCs.

Maybe Microsoft have weathered this storm though, we all know they can afford a rough time once in a while but with Windows 8.1, a new Surface on the way and Xbox One on the horizon, I wouldn’t count them out of the game just yet.

Thank you Mashable for providing us with this information.

Image courtesy of Life4gadgets.