It’s the most wonderful time of the year – for Surface!
There are many wonderful things happening across the board for Surface, and I want to share a few of them with you.
In October, the unveiling of Surface Studio and Surface Dial captured people’s imagination with a completely new way to create at your desk. The announcement of Surface Book with Performance Base took the laptop with industry-leading customer satisfaction and made it even better by adding twice the graphics power and 30% more battery.
November was our best month ever for consumer Surface sales. The Best Buy-exclusive Surface bundle sold out on the first day. The momentum was seen worldwide. In the UK, we had the best single week for Surface ever and in Germany the Surface Pen became the best seller in PC Accessories on Amazon.com for over 12 hours.
Surface Studio is shipping and people love it.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BzMLA8YIgG0
The excitement for Surface Studio is clear – evidenced by the 10+ million people that have viewed our launch video and the hundreds of thousands who watched the excitement of a fun unboxing of a Surface Studio. But what makes me excited is seeing how people are using, and loving their Surface Studios. Digital artists, to architects, to executives are using this beautiful PC to get things done and be their most creative.
More people are switching from Macs to Surface than ever before. Our trade-in program for MacBooks was our best ever, and the combination of excitement for the innovation of Surface coupled with the disappointment of the new MacBook Pro – especially among professionals – is leading more and more people to make the switch to Surface, like this. It seems like a new review recommending Surface over MacBook comes out daily. This makes our team so proud, because it means we’re doing good work.
Surface Book with Performance Base is now available in Australia and New Zealand.
More markets for Surface Book with Performance Base: Coming off strong momentum in the US and Canada, Surface Book with Performance Base is now available in Australia and New Zealand, and we’re excited to announce we will make it available in more markets. Starting early next quarter, Surface Book with Performance Base will go on sale in Austria, China, France, Germany, Hong Kong, Japan, Switzerland and the UK.
Surface Hub is also gaining momentum as it continues to change how organizations collaborate and create. To add to our already-stellar momentum, we’re excited to share more details about the ways Surface Hub is helping teams in the workplace be more productive. Check it out:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hql0oUxxQuU
By the end of 2016, nine months since our launch, we will have shipped Surface Hubs to over 2,000 customers in 24 markets.
The demand we are seeing with Surface Hub far exceeds our expectations, even though we knew it was a game-changing product. By the end of 2016, nine months since our launch, we will have shipped Surface Hubs to over 2,000 customers in 24 markets. The average deal size we see in the pipeline is approximately 50 units, but we’ve seen orders as large as 1,500 units to a large car manufacturer. This makes our team so, so proud.*
We’ve ramped up Surface Hub production and it’s available for customers worldwide. Resellers worldwide have units. To help meet the demand for Surface Hub, and to provide a great experience for customers, we’re adding more value-added partners who will resell Surface and provide 5-star service to our customers.
We’re introducing a Surface Hub Try-and-Buy Program.
We’re introducing a Surface Hub Try-and-Buy Program: We will enable a select set of our resellers to provide customers Hubs for 30 days before the committing to purchasing a large set of devices. This will launch in US and European Surface Hub markets this winter, and in Asia pacific at a later date. We have the data to show that this is a winner program, because people and businesses that use Surface Hub are amazed by it – and really want their business to use Surface Hub.
We’ve added new Surface Hub features and programs. In a February 2016 study, Forrester estimated that the ROI of integrating a Surface Hub into an organization was 138%. They measured meeting time saved per meeting to be 15 – 23 minutes and sales as a result of the Surface Hub were up 20% with a payback period is nine months. We believe our momentum in just nine months proves the study correct, and we’ve added some features that our customers have asked for most upgrade executive offices and conferences rooms around the world – with the power of a software-driven product:
- Inking support across Word, Excel and PowerPoint. People are loving using Pen on Surface Hub, now we let them do it in the most used Office apps!
- Support for simultaneous Pen and Touch. People, especially people that have used Surfaces, expect these things to work together. They do now!
- Save & recall Whiteboards directly through OneDrive. If we do important work together, let’s make sure we can save it and share it!
- Support for 3rd-party peripherals like BiAmp TesireForte CI, Jabra 810, Logitech Group, Logitech PTZ Pro and Polycom CX5100. We have amazing cameras and audio equipment people want to use in their conference rooms and exec offices. We now have more they can use!
- Preloading PowerBI, OneDrive, and Photos apps. Every Surface Hub user should be able to analyze data better, get to their files, and go through the teams’ images.
As you can see, we’re so proud of the momentum and progress we are making with our Surface line-up. We’re learning a ton from Surface and Surface Hub customers and have an amazing team of hardware and software engineers dedicated to continually improving our products. You should expect the best and we expect to give you the best, today and tomorrow. We will continue to create new experiences for you that will change the way you create, collaborate and have an impact on your world in 2017, and beyond. Thanks for making it a great holiday season!
Brian
*12/12/16: This blog post was updated to clarify Surface Hub demand data.
