MICROSOFT TO BURY SURFACE TABLETS IN DESERT By Naven Jones, Freelance Investigative Journalist After the humiliation of a 900 million dollar write down and the ousting of their former CEO, Steve Ballmer, Microsoft has released the second generation of their Surface RT and Surface Pro tablets. This leaves Redmond with the problem of what to do with millions of leftover first generation hardware. The price drop they tried has not increased sales. They seemingly can't give these things away, as even charities Microsoft has tried to donate their ill-fated tablets to have rejected them. The market eschewing Microsoft products is not exactly new. Microsoft BOB, Windows ME and Windows Vista were wildly unpopular. The Zune was no iPod killer. Some things like Docs.com, Mediaroom and Kin Studio are so obscure that you may never have even heard of them. Surface isn't even the first failed tablet, there was once a thing called Courier. Microsoft never sees these failures and public backlashes coming. Their corporate culture keeps them out of touch in their ivory tower, having no idea what the computing public wants and needs. Sometimes, it seems they have no concern. "Don't expect this to be widely publicized," my source told me. "Electronics are often not the most environmentally friendly thing to be putting into the ground, so they hope to do this quietly, but putting them into the ground is exactly what they have planned." The answer that executives have come up with is a New Mexico landfill site. After considerable wrangling and politicking, the company best known for Windows and Office has gotten permission to use a site in Alamogordo. Here, millions of the unsold and returned tablets largely considered the biggest flop in portable computing will be laid to rest. It will be kind of like burying the poor and nameless in unmarked, mass graves. In spite of the billions they must have spent developing and manufacturing those tablets, they're trash now. I was skeptical about all that he was telling me. After all, people do like to talk, but that alone is not news. I asked my source to present some evidence. "This is strictly on the Q.T. or we are done here, but I have been on the inside. I have seen and heard things." He then showed me a Microsoft temporary employee ID badge. He was so cautious that he kept a finger covering his name, but the picture there was certainly him. I went on to ask whether the higher ups at Redmond had any plans to stop people from going on digging expeditions, and he assured me they did. "All of it will be shredded. Tiny bits of plastic, silicon and metals will be buried deep, and then covered with a concrete shell. They hope not to leave any evidence to be found." All of this sounded familiar to me. I asked if he had ever heard of a bunch of dud video games being dumped in a landfill like this in the '80s. He said that he had never heard of any such thing, but smiled when he said it. He then whistled the theme from a popular movie of that decade, one featuring an alien. He then said, "Most people think that was just an urban legend, but this one is actually happening." HOME