Today in an SEC filing , Microsoft revealed a very interesting fact: Its Surface tablet hybrid line brought in revenue of $853 million in the company’s fiscal 2013. However, the Surface line didn’t become available for sale until October 26, giving it 247 days in the market during the financial period. That places Surface revenue on a per-day basis at $3.45 million . Extrapolated for a one-year period, that financial rate puts the Surface line on a $1.26 billion per-year run rate. However, I would wager that revenues for Surface were highest at launch of the Surface RT and Pro, and lower in between, so the per-day and per-year estimates could vary. Reviews of the figure have been decidedly negative. The Next Web’s Josh Ong flatly stated that the revenue figure confirmed that the tablet line is a “financial failure.” Tom Warren over at The Verge noted that the total revenue for the devices is less than the $900 million writedown that Microsoft took during its last quarter. And Todd Bishop of GeekWire underlined that the $853 million in revenue is again less than the $898 million in new costs that Microsoft called “primarily with Windows 8 and Surface.” If Surface were a standalone business, it would be dead. However, as a Microsoft division, it is anything but. Microsoft as a company has tectonic financial wealth in the form of past profits stored as cash. It has decided to enter the OEM world, and has, to my knowledge, continued with the Surface project, slow initial sales be damned. There is a firm, recent precedent for the company to continue to invest in this way: Windows Phone. It took two full years of hard scrabble work to get Windows Phone to a point in which it was healthy enough to walk a bit on its own. Put another way, until Windows Phone 8 and the recent Nokia handsets, the smartphone line was sucking air. Perhaps not as much as Surface, given that the line of tablets has caused material damage to Microsoft’s short-term profits — the $900 million charge was $0.07 in lost EPS for the company in the last quarter. However, Microsoft has the money, and if it wants to can continue to pour it into Surface, as it did with Windows Phone, and Bing, and other properties that it finds to be strategically important. Does Microsoft want to cede complete hardware primacy to its OEM partners that have failed for so long to demonstrate innovation and forward-looking thought? I don’t think so, no. Naturally, Microsoft would prefer if Surface lost less money, but I don’t think that Microsoft is done with this project yet. A decent test: If the rollout of the next-generation Surface line is muted, we could be watching the door close. Top Image Credit: Vernon Chan
See more here:
Surface Scorecard: Microsoft’s Tablet Had FY2013 Revenue Of $853M, Or $3.4M Per Day
First time accepted submitter marshallr writes “Technical Information Release TIR 13-10 becomes effective in Massachusetts on July 31st, 2013. It requires software consultants to collect a 6.25% sales tax from their clients if they perform ‘computer system design services and the modification, integration, enhancement, installation or configuration of standardized software.’ TIR 13-10 was published to mass.gov on July 25th, 2013 to provide the public a few working days to review the release and make comments.” Read more of this story at Slashdot. 
A great artist can make beauty out of any medium, no matter how limited. 97-year-old Hal Lasko embodies this concept. Instead of painting with dozens of expensive brushes or high-end software suites, Lasko uses a tool most of us have used and abandoned years ago—Microsoft Paint from Windows 95. Read more… 
Trying a new method of making money off its free e-mail service, the Internet giant has begun putting ads in Gmail’s “promotions” category. [Read more] 
A Reddit contributor decides to use the forum to progressively reveal the alleged future results of WWE fights. Oddly, his predictions are eerily accurate. [Read more] 
Police remain baffled about a woman who walked into staff areas of a Boca Raton, Fla., Apple store, a mystery object strapped to her, and claimed she needed help. [Read more] 
Plug just launched a Kickstarter campaign for its $69 adapter. It will transform your USB drives into a personal Dropbox for all your devices. Thanks to a deep integration in your filesystem, you won’t have to move your files to a special folder or a virtual hard drive. After launching Plug’s app, everything is transparent and you won’t have to change your workflow. Except that all your devices will now have the same files. Very much like TechCrunch Disrupt alumni Bitcasa , you can cache some folders and files on your local hard drive or stream them from Plug. The only limit in Plug’s case is the amount of storage space you have on your USB drives. Behind the scene, Plug is a small Linux-based machine that creates a VPN network. Then, if you want to access your files from your iPhone, Plug’s client will silently connect to the network and show you all your files. It looks a lot like Dropbox’s app, except that your files are stored at home and you don’t pay a subscription fee. You could say that it’s pretty similar to a network-attached storage device, but with a software trick to replace your entire filesystem. “Our innovation with Plug is a software innovation more than a hardware innovation, ” co-founder and CEO Séverin Marcombes told me. “We could have designed this system in the cloud if it weren’t so expensive and so slow, ” he continued. After launching the app, all your files will go through Plug. With a USB 2.0 connector and an Ethernet 100 port, it could be a bit slow to stream movies, especially if you have multiple drives plugged into the adapter. That’s why you can cache your files. Even though Plug claims that you can use your files just the way you used to do, this new paradigm will probably take some time before getting used to it. Marcombes compared the caching feature with Spotify’s offline playlist feature, a button that Spotify users already know well. The Kickstarter campaign just started but its goal is pretty low. At $69, 000, the Paris-based team will certainly attract a thousand backers to reach its goal. You’ll just have to wait until December before getting your hands on the device. 