It’s not that difficult to get a product to sell out in the stores if you only send a few to the stores in the first place. There are some mutterings that this is what has happened as reports are coming in that Microsoft‘s Surface Pro has pretty much sold out where it was available.
If you were wondering how well the public would take to a Microsoft-made tablet costing $899 or more… quite well, at least from initial impressions. The 128GB Surface Pro has sold out at Microsoft’s US online store, and checks suggest a lack of stock at both the company’s retail stores as well as Best Buy and Staples.
OK, that’s good news of a sort.
Microsoft has announced “amazing†customer response to its tablet/notebook hybrid Surface Pro, and reports have noted that the higher end 128GB model has sold out in some locations “immediately†after going on sale, just as the Zune HD did in 2009.
Note that the Zune selling out at launch didn’t exactly make the product a hugely successful one.
According to a recent report from Digitimes, Microsoft was only planning on having an initial shipment volume of one million Surface Pro units. This is obviously less than what Microsoft planning with the Surface RT, which had an initial shipment volume of four million units. Could this be a factor in why the Surface Pro is already being sold out?
A million units: that would be good sales if there really had been one million available retail at launch. But that might not be quite the right number:
But once they got there, many said they discovered their stores had very few of the Surface Pro 128 GB models and in some cases, equally few of the 64 GB ones.
I received e-mails from a few readers who made treks to their local stores on Saturday morning only to discover stores received a handful, or in some cases, just one 128 GB Surface Pro. Some stores still have 64 GB Surface Pros on hand as of February 10. Users can’t order these devices online via the Microsoft Store, Best Buy or Staples sites because they are “sold out.â€
If you advertise something for months, build a big expectation, then release only a few into the retail channel then yes, you can engineer a “sold out†situation. Which is what one commenter on Microsoft’s official blog seems to think has happened:
Like many others I tried to order online and in the stores. At Midnight the website was still not showing for sale, I tried for 30 minutes then all of a sudden sold out online. Before they even opened for business all Best Buy show unavailable. My 3 local Staples received 2 64gb versions each.
Just two.
There are 1050 Best Buy stores in the US, there are 1575 Staples stores, Staples seems to have received an average of 2-4 unit and best buy 6-8
If you do the math the max number of retail units you had available at launch was: 15000
Whether those are the real numbers, or whether as a projection they get anywhere near reality, isn’t quite the point. Which is that yes, we’ve reports of the Surface Pro “selling outâ€. But what we’d really like to know is how many were shipped in the first place?
Even a million units as a first manufacturing run isn’t exactly all that large now, is it?
Tidak ada komentar:
Posting Komentar