Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by eykanal 4946 days ago
Everyone's blown away because they priced themselves out of their target market. Whether they agree or not, this is going to be compared to the other tablets (i.e., the iPad) out there, and for the base models, the cost is almost double. For a company attempting to play catch-up, their giving themselves such a tremendous handicap is pretty unexpected.
2 comments
moconnor 4946 days ago
I don't think their target market for the Pro is the hobbyist, or Mom and Pa, it's the enterprise business market, where the iPad has seen little penetration.

This market doesn't care if the kickstand works on your knee. Or about a few hundred dollars here or there. Exchange integration, legacy internal applications, these things matter.

Note taking in meetings.

link
taylodl 4946 days ago
I work in the enterprise business market, for a 100 year old blue chip firm - and the iPads have come in like a tsunami thanks to our BYOD policy. They have Exchange integration. Legacy internal applications? These have all been web-enabled over the past 10 years.

And the adoption has been top-down: it's the C-level execs that are driving this change. This has been going on for two years now. Microsoft seriously missed the boat and more and more is considered to be an old-school technology company like IBM.

link
steverb 4946 days ago
Active Directory integration is huge for the enterprises I deal with.
link
absconditus 4946 days ago
Enterprise users are still stuck on IE 6, 7, and 8. How are they going to use tablets with IE 10?
link
wvenable 4946 days ago
The 64GB iPad is $699 vs. $899 for the Surface Pro. That's not double. I'd say that's entirely in the same market. In my opinion the Surface Pro is better value since it is a full PC.
link
bjustin 4946 days ago
The cheapest version of a device gets people in the door. Many people will, rightly or wrongly, compare the $499 iPad 4 with the $899 Surface Pro. That one has 16 GB of space and the other has 64 GB (well more like 48 GB since Windows and Office take a lot of space) comes into play after people are thinking the iPad is way cheaper than the Surface Pro.
link
wvenable 4946 days ago
The Surface Pro isn't the cheapest Surface device (it even has "Pro" right there in the name).

The cheapest iPad is still more expensive than most Android tablets.

link
majorlazer 4946 days ago
Why not compare the $499 iPad to the Surface RT?
link