Microsoft Promotes Survey That Shows Big Preference for Macs (Premium)

Microsoft’s beleaguered Surface business needs a win. This isn’t it.

As you may have seen if you follow my Twitter feed, Microsoft today promoted a Creative Strategies survey claiming that “more employees say they would choose Surface” over other PC makes, including Apple’s Mac.

There are a number of problems with this position, and while I tried to have fun with this on Twitter, the truth is far more sobering. In fact, there isn’t anything funny about this at all.

Sadly, Surface has had a horrible year.

Concurrent with a damning Consumer Reports recommendation that customers do not purchase Surface devices because of rampant reliability issues, Microsoft’s newest PCs are not selling well. In the most recent quarter, Microsoft sold fewer PCs than it did in the same quarter one year earlier. This despite shipping four major new devices—Surface Laptop, Surface Pro (2017), (two versions of) Surface Book 2, and Surface Pro with LT—each of which hits at the heart of product lineup. In the year-ago quarter, Microsoft released only two niche products, Surface Studio and Surface Book with Performance Base. And yet, it still sold fewer devices a year later.

I have a hard time understanding why Surface isn’t doing better. Microsoft’s PC business offers high-quality premium PCs that, in many cases, inspire partners and customers alike to think of PCs as being the equal of Macs in both style and quality. And while I have complained about the slow push to modern technologies like USB-C and Thunderbolt 3, that in no way explains the sales drop-off this year. Something is wrong.

To counter the bad vibes around Surface—including an embarrassing chapter in which Microsoft had to deny rumors that it was killing the product lineup—Microsoft has had to make a bit of lemonade.

First, it publicly voiced support for Surface while internally, it argued against the Consumer Reports recommendation by claiming that customer satisfaction with Surface devices was, in fact, very high. This has nothing to do with reliability, as it turns out, but it’s fair to believe that more recent devices, like those Microsoft shipped in 2017, are more reliable than those from the previous year. And with sales falling, Microsoft shipped two lower-cost versions of its newest laptops.

And then this week happened.

“Creative Strategies asked a panel of 1300 US consumers about their preferences for how they use their PCs for both personal and professional scenarios,” Microsoft explains. “Responses showed Surface is winning over early tech adopters and continuing to challenge Apple within the broader survey set.”

So, the survey does show those things. The issue is that those things are meaningless.

What the survey really shows is that those people who have no say in what computers their workplaces provide them with are engaging in wishful thinking: If money were no object, which products would they choose? And the answer is obvious enough: The most expensive ones. MacBooks first, and then Microsoft’s Surface PCs.

You can find data in this survey to support a few different opinions, I guess. But like the customer satisfaction data that Microsoft also relies on, none of this translates into sales. Macs may account for only 5 percent of PC sales worldwide, but this product line also outsells Surface by a wide margin. In the real world, Surface doesn’t even make the top 10 among PC makers.

But the weirdest part of this survey from my perspective is that the only companies Microsoft is really “beating” here—and again, this is just in perception—is its own partners. If you look at any of the provided charts, you’ll see that Surface handily outranks HP, Acer, Lenovo, Dell, Sony (which doesn’t even make PCs, by the way), Samsung, and others.

And Microsoft even touts this advantage directly when it highlights the following quote from the report.

“There is also no doubt that in consumer’s minds the only brand able to compete with Apple is Microsoft Surface.”

Wow. What horrible news that must be to companies like HP, Lenovo, and Dell. Each, in fact, makes PCs that compete with Apple from a quality perspective, and outsell Apple—and Surface—handily in the market. In fact, it’s not even close.