By Stephen Schenck | December 11, 2012 10:58 AM
How’s Surface doing? We’ve been asking ourselves that question a lot lately, as Microsoft’s big foray into tablets has found itself arriving under intense scrutiny. There were the big huff over Steve Ballmer’s comments this time last month, where reports that he described Surface sales as “modest” were later clarified to claim he was talking about the state of Microsoft’s supply of the tablet. More recently, we heard that the Surface Pro might arrive early to offset poor RT sales, but Microsoft has instead stuck with a early 2013 release. What we need are some real numbers to look at. Right on cue, some new web usage statistics have arrived, and the picture they paint doesn’t look that great for Surface.
This data comes from Chitika, the same firm that collected the data we examined earlier in the month concerning the mobile web shares claimed by iOS and Android devices. They examine web impressions from users in the US and Canada alone. This time, Chitika looked specifically at connections that could be attributed to tablets. Out of all that traffic coming from tablets, Microsoft’s Surface accounts for a mere 0.13%.
That sounds like barely a blip on the radar, but it’s not entirely bad news for Microsoft. For comparison, Nexus series tablets, including both the Nexus 7 and new Nexus 10, supposedly make up only 0.91% of tablet traffic themselves. Considering the months and months that the Nexus 7 has been available, and the reportedly brisk sales it’s seen, for Microsoft to be doing just one-seventh as well this early on doesn’t seem quite so awful.
