Snippet: Rough Times in Surface Club ☇

Peter Bright for Ars Technica:

Microsoft’s third-quarter financial results were published yesterday, and they had many high points: cloud revenue is growing well (though we have some misgivings about how the numbers are reported), Windows outperformed the PC market, and Office 365 passed 100 million corporate seats. But there were a couple of significant black marks: Phone revenue has dropped to effectively zero, and Surface revenue was down sharply year on year, with a 26-percent drop in revenue. […]

With this stagnation, falling sales are inevitable. Until Microsoft shows the brand some love, the decline will only continue. We’re not expecting to see that love any time soon, either; the company’s guidance for the current quarter is that Surface sales will continue to fall. Microsoft is holding an event next week, and we expect there to be some hardware element, but we’ve also heard from sources close to the matter that there won’t be updates to the Surface Pro or Surface Book.

I’m not really sure what the deal is, as the Surface hardware is pretty nice and if anything, sets an example for the rest of the Windows world. With the way Microsoft treated their Lumia line, I hope the same thing doesn’t happen. Having picked up a Lumia 650 as a spare device to play with, Windows 10 Mobile is pretty nicely designed and different enough from iOS and Android to feel original. The big downside is that apps aren’t there, even basic ones that most would expect on a mobile platform and that’s what did Windows Mobile in as a whole. For the Surfaces, they’re running regular Windows 10, which has a healthy ecosystem of legacy applications, this shouldn’t be a problem.