Redefining “a few”

Neowin reporting on a Microsoft Internal event hosted by Steve Ballmer:

During his internal address, Ballmer stated that Windows is not selling well enough, which shouldn’t come as a major surprise, as the company has blamed just about everything under the sun for the slower adoption of Windows 8.

On the Surface:

We built a few more devices than we could sell

For those keeping score, “a few” is now shorthand for $900 million.  Never go out with Ballmer for a few beers.

Something which stood out:

As for the next Surface? The device is currently in testing and will feature ‘typical improvements’ which is likely a spec bump. Internal response to the next gen Surface has been positive.

Hmm.  Presumably that’s amongst the same audience that thought that users were crying out for an unusable version of Office on their tablets.

Much like BlackBerry, at some point MicroSoft needs to admit to itself that it has something on its hands that people simply don’t want.  You can’t blame the sales teams for not selling something no one actually wants.