And that too, in 2019. The Surface line of hardware has been growing from strength to strength, but there is no shortage of people who believe that the brand is on its death bed.
Even as Redmond recently refreshed its hardware lineup, which itself has broken into the top 5.
However, all that is not enough to convince the CEO of Canalys, a market research firm, to change his prediction that he made last year where he claimed that it did not make sense for Microsoft to continue to build first-party hardware as the Surface line was causing the company to lose money.
Steve Brazier made those claims last year, and found backing by Lenovo COO and Darius Hess from Dell.
He reiterated those claims again this month, saying that Redmond would be far better served by focusing on other ventures:
“It would be much more sensible for Microsoft to stop spending money on Surface and focus on its cloud and application business where it’s doing really well.”
His predication from last year banked on the fact that Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella was very much willing to shut down businesses that resulted in losses for the company.
Events like the closure of Groove and the Nokia write-off were proof enough.
It is this strategy that is lending fire to the market analyst and his understanding that Nadella will again come to this conclusion. Even if it takes a choppy quarter or two before he decides to pull the plug, but pull the plug he will.
Bold forecasts to make, with no signs of the Surface line going to die anytime soon.
In fact, Panos Panay has made it clear that the company wants to explore and innovate further with even more form factors. Who coincidentally, also rubbished these claims by Steve Brazier as tabloid rumor last year.
Anyway, we know for a fact that 2019 and 2020 will see Microsoft launching the Surface Hub successors, along with hopefully a pocketable Surface device.
As for 2019, there are 79 days left in the year.
That’s 2 months, 2 weeks and 4 days.
Enough time for what Senor Steve Brazier is predicting to come true.
We shall see!
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