I don’t get this. Microsoft announces in June that they will ship a tablet somewhere around Fall, with a undisclosed price! Does this makes any sense?
If it would ship today, then many people would probably buy it as a impulse purchase and this single momentum alone could probably make sure that the product “sticked” to the market and kept on selling. After an initial run of several hundred thousand sales, is probably difficult to just ignore a product all together.
But making everyone wait for three to six months? First, the only way the “regular Joe” will have access to the Surface experience is through journalists and commenters and regular “tech pundits”. But what if those folks, which are usually hyper-critical and always have an axe to grind or an angle to the story, slander it? What if they say that the battery sucks or the keyboard-cover is useless or it gets too hot? With the iPad there was a deluge of bloggers and regular folks saying that the whole “warmgate” was an absurd and exaggeration from Consumer Reports. Mouth to mouth communication helps a lot spreading the “good news” of a product and fighting doubts and confusion. Regular, intermediated, press on the other hand is always a risk and usually tend to focus on the defects.
As usual Microsoft seems to try to take a step forward that then translates into a risky movement and ends in two steps towards oblivion. Until the Fall, Surface can either disappear in the wind or surge again with bad reviews. But it won’t stay on the news with praises and excited covers and reviews for four or six months that’s for sure. Maybe i’m wrong, but this has pretty much been the pattern in the last years.