Will you trade your iPad for Microsoft Surface RT?

Close on the heels of Apple announcing its trade in program in the US in which consumers can buy back new iPhone 5S or 5C by surrendering their older iPhones and in turn get a gift voucher they can use for their new iPhone purchases.

Now Microsoft in its Surface Facebook page posted this: "Get $200 or more toward a new Surface RT when you trade in that old iPad 2 ,3,or 4. Time to finally get stuff done. Visit a Microsoft Store for details."
Bloomberg News quoting Rich Adolph, a Microsoft spokesperson said that, "It's a recycling for rewards program and not just making inroads in Apple's territory."

However there is caveat: the iPad's traded has to be ‘gently used'. And it is to be seen whether there any fine prints involved when the consumer drops into a Microsoft store with their old iPads. This program might work for some of those legacy iPad users who owns iPad 2 and do not know what to do with that. And getting $ 200 discount is indeed a big deal on that.

As we look at the prices right now, Surface RT starts from $ 349 for 32 GB variants and Surface Pro starts at $ 799. Assuming a consumer gets $ 200 rebate, Surface RT will be just about $ 149. That looks indeed enticing as it's not a bad tab either and comes loaded with lots of goodies, including some of MS office apps.

But from a market share perspective Surface tabs are nowhere near Apple iPad, and it may be recalled Microsoft made a whopping write off $ 900 mn on Surface tablets inventory last quarter. Interestingly a class action suit was also filed against Microsoft for misleading its shareholders on Surface units numbers and sales.

Volumes- that's the big issue for Microsoft right now and looking at the current tablet market dynamics it's polarized on iOS and Android and denting into that bi-polarity is indeed an uphill task for Microsoft. Both Apple and Google have a huge app store as well, yet again this is one pain area for Microsoft when its stacks its app store with Google and Apple.

Tablets market right now is extremely competitive and not new to disaster stories. For instance BlackBerry's Playbook can be called as industry one of biggest disaster in the recent times. Will Surface suffer a similar fate or initiatives like ‘trade in' work? The truth is out there!