Microsoft's Surface Tablet Sales Tanked

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Sales of Microsoft's Surface tablet were way down last quarter, after showing some decent growth during the holiday quarter of 2013.

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Microsoft doesn't report how many Surface tablet units it sells, but it does report revenue from its Surface business, which includes the tablets and accessories like the keyboard covers.

Microsoft said Surface revenue was $500 million for last quarter. That's a big drop from the $893 million in Surface revenue the company reported for Q4 2013. Still, Surface revenue is up about 50% year over year.

We can also come up with a pretty good guess as to how many Surfaces Microsoft sold last quarter by assuming an average selling price, or ASP, of each unit. There are a bunch of different Surface models ranging from $299 to over $1,000 in price. Microsoft told us in January that it sells more of the cheaper models, so if we're being kind to Microsoft, let's assume an ASP of $600, which will help account for the ~$100 keyboard cover that's pretty essential to the Surface tablet.

That comes to about 830,000 Surface tablets sold last quarter.

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Microsoft isn't alone. Apple is struggling with its iPad business too. Growth has stalled, and Wednesday the company whiffed big time on sales expectations. In fact, iPad sales growth was negative for the first quarter of 2014.