Microsoft Surface Hub to ship starting January 1, 2016, rather than September 1, 2015, as originally planned
Microsoft delays its giant tablet Blair Hanley Frank / PCWorld : Microsoft's Surface Hub collaboration tool delayed until 2016 Carly Page / Inquirer : Microsoft's 84in Surface has been delayed until 2016 Nicole Arce / Tech Times : Microsoft Surface Hub Shipment Delayed: 84-Inch Collaboration Tool Arrives January 2016 JC Torres / SlashGear : Microsoft delays Surface Hub to January 1 because too popular Richard Chirgwin / The Register : Microsoft: Surface hub will ship from January 1, 2016 Mary Jo Foley / CNET : Microsoft delays Surface Hub shipments to January Adnan Farooqui / Ubergizmo : Microsoft Will Ship Surface Hub On January 1st 2016 Robert Bartley / FierceCIO News : Despite delays, Microsoft's Surface Hub may be best hope yet for enterprise smart screen market Alex Wilhelm / TechCrunch : Microsoft Postpones Ship Date For Its ‘Surface Hub’ Wall Computer To January John Callaham / Windows Central : The big Surface Hub PCs with Windows 10 won't start shipping until January 2016 Sean Buckley / Engadget : Microsoft's 84-inch Surface Hub won't ship until 2016 Kareem Anderson / WinBeta : Microsoft settles on Jan 1st 2016 as Surface Hub shipping date Mark Wilson / BetaNews : Microsoft Surface Hub shipping slips to 2016
Context & Ripple Effects
Microsoft's Surface Hub was announced in June 2015 as an 84-inch 4K collaboration display priced at $20,000, with a September 2015 ship date. The delay to January 1, 2016 pushes that first shipment window out by four months.
The slip proved to be a pattern rather than a one-off: by December Microsoft had raised prices on both sizes by $2,000-$3,000 (to $8,999 and $21,999) and pushed delivery again into Q1, with actual shipments only starting in late March 2016.
First-order effects
- Enterprise customers expecting Surface Hub units in September 2015 must wait until at least January 2016, delaying any boardroom or huddle-room deployments built around the device.
- Buyers who committed at the original June 2015 pricing face uncertainty over whether the announced $20,000 / $7,000 prices still hold once shipments begin.
Second-order effects
- The December price hike of $2,000-$3,000 per unit suggests demand or cost pressure strong enough for Microsoft to reprice before the first units even shipped, testing how elastic enterprise buyers are for premium collaboration hardware.
- Rivals selling large-format touch displays and conferencing systems gain a four-to-six-month window to land deployments Microsoft would otherwise have captured in late 2015.
Third-order effects
- If the delay-reprice-slip sequence holds as a template, first-generation Surface hardware becomes a slow, high-margin niche line — which is roughly what follows, since Microsoft's next major refresh, the Surface Hub 2S, does not arrive until 2019 and its 85-inch successor not until 2021.
The trend: Premium enterprise collaboration hardware is settling into long, repriced release cycles where Microsoft treats each Surface Hub generation as a multi-year platform rather than a annually refreshed product.