Liam Tung
| October 8, 2021
| Topic: Hardware
Microsoft wants Excel to be a big competitive sport (and it should be)
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Microsoft has acquiesced to an activist shareholder request for the company to make its Surface and Xbox hardware easier to repair.
As You Sow, an investor advocacy group, says it filed a shareholder resolution with the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) aimed at Microsoft’s hardware.
Microsoft is primarily a software company, but it does have a $1 billion Surface business and makes the Xbox gaming console – though it has nothing in hardware on the scale of Apple, Samsung, Dell, HP or Lenovo.
SEE: Microsoft’s Windows 11: How to get it now (or later)
Microsoft is an interesting target. The company already has an eye on repairability, having shown off the Surface Laptop 3 with a keyboard cover that can be readily removed by repairers to access the motherboard. Right-to-repair activist iFixit noted that this Surface device “swerved confidently into a better, more repairable direction.”
But its influence on hardware is mostly through Windows OEMs like Dell, Lenovo, and HP as well as the Azure cloud.
Change is also slow in hardware production lines. As You Sow announced this week that in June it submitted a demand to the SEC that Microsoft “explore the environmental and social benefits of making its devices easier to repair through measures such as the public provision of tools, parts and repair instructions.”
iFixit, which gives hardware makers a score of zero to 10 based on repairability, has been critical of how Apple, Samsung, and Microsoft design their products, claiming the companies prevent consumers and repairers from accessing components and tools to repair hardware, such as phones, desktops, earphones and smartwatches.
iFixit co-founder and CEO Kyle Wiens in July slammed Apple and Microsoft at an Australian government hearing into the repair issue.
“The Surface laptop got a zero. It had a glued-in battery … we had to actually cut our way into the product and destroyed it in the process of trying to get inside,” Wiens told Australian officials.
As You Sow says its SEC shareholder resolution targeted Microsoft because its products are creating ‘premature landfill’.
“Microsoft positions itself as a leader on climate and the environment, yet facilitates premature landfilling of its devices by restricting consumer access to device reparability,” Kelly McBee, As You Sow’s waste program coordinator, said in a press release.
“To take genuine action on sustainability and ease pressure on extraction of limited resources including precious metals, the company must extend the useful life of its devices by facilitating widespread access to repair.”
As You Sow points to the recent US federal proposal for a Fair Repair Act that would require tech firms to provide consumers and repairers with diagnostics information to repair hardware.
As You Sow points out the glaring contradiction between tech giants’ stance on carbon emissions and their consumer policies. Amazon, Microsoft and Google have made bold commitments to cut carbon emissions by 2030 while rolling out new cloud, networking and consumer hardware products.
Related Topics:
Microsoft
PCs
Servers
Storage
Networking
Data Centers
Liam Tung
| October 8, 2021
| Topic: Hardware