Microsoft offers Surface-as-a-Service from its own stores First Microsoft turned Office into software-as-a-service. It's currently transforming Windows into Windows-as-a-service. And now it's decided that its Surface Pro typoslab should become Surface-as-a-service, to help businesses buy more of the hybrid machines. Surface-as-a-Service, or "Surface Membership" to use its proper name …
Microsoft is leasing the hardware. It is not atypical for companies to lease computers, MFPs and such. Some companies prefer not to spend on permanent assets but to lease their equipment.
This is not about Microsoft changing their business model, you're still free to buy the equipment, but I'm afraid my point will be lost in the tsunami of MS haters.
Leasing implies that you are paying for the depreciation of an item over your term of usage.
Based on the default settings for a Surfacebook Pro i5/8g/128, you can pay $1848 over 18 months, or $1848 over 24 months. If a device looses almost $2k in value over 18 months, how does it proceed to loose absolutely $0 additional value over the next 6 months?
Go to the find a reseller. Select Staples (first on my list), takes you to a page promoting Surface 3 and Surface Pro 3. No mention of the rental deal at all. Nothing about Surface Pro 4 either.
Until MS get this stuff right, it doesn't matter how good their offering is.
Edit: It's even worse than I first thought - the content comes from MS!!!
" Until MS get this stuff right, ... "
Aaaannnd there's your problem!
Seriously. I've never been a Fanboi as such, but so far they had stuff that was useful and usable for me to get the stuff done that I do. Sometime in the late 1980ies I had to make a choice, and as I'm in civil engineering that choice was DOS/Win because there was next to nothing suitable on the Mac. I had worked on the first Macs and it was great, and if I wouldn't have had the need to run software for structural design and a CAD program fit for structural design I just as well might have chosen Apple.
(Okay, apart from DOS/Win boxen I also had the odd Mac laptop, a string of Newtons, and for a while I worked with a CAD package that ran on UNIX, I think SCO, that would run on Compaq PCs, and every now and then toy with Linux on the old box that had been replaced by the new WIn box.)
All these years MS products were far from perfect, but they worked reasonable well and MS policy was workable.
But right now they are pissing me off, big time. For me, 2016 will be the year of the Linux destktop.
It's even more of a screwup!
Reading through the terms of the Business membership it is obvious that this is just a nationally based, return to vendor warranty and not a full blown support and repair service; so no next business day on-site device replacement anywhere in the world.
"If you call Surface cheap- you must mean diamond chips?"
Compared to what that sort of computing power (not that it would have fitted in such a small box) would have cost you, say, 30 years ago? Yeah, cheap. Dirt cheap. It's just a pity that most of the improvement in performance gets eaten up by sloppy coding, so to speak. But that's another story.
Great example of just how f*cking dumb Microsoft can be; there's a store in the King Of Prussia mall but not one in Center City Philadelphia, 20 miles away. Apple have big stores in both places. The people who Microsoft need to attract to their devices would not be seen dead in KoP whilst the Apple stores are waist deep in punters and drones all day every day. The KoP store is a total waste of real estate. I'm sure other conurbations have similar examples.
Oh, and I just noticed there's one in the Christiana Mall in Delaware. Do Microsoft know how few people there are in Delaware? (clue, the state has ONE congressional district) The only people who go to Delaware are Philadelphians going across the border to buy cheap booze - but no Surfaces.
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Seems too close to the Free Hardware model (of which you can read more here: http://www.catb.org/esr/writings/free-hardware.html) - it proposes a world of free hardware and costly software. And I'm really not liking the idea of not having the power to install an operating system different than Micro$oft Window$ on a computer that I own.
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