Was Dell, HP Surprised or Angered by Microsoft's New Tablet?

On Monday, Microsoft MSFT CEO Steve Ballmer told AllThingsD that the company's PC partners were prepared for the unveiling of the first Microsoft-branded tablet. "Our PC partners knew in advance we were announcing something today in this space," he said. But when asked how these partners felt about the tablet, Ballmer said "no comment" and moved on to another topic. On Tuesday, a Dell DELL spokesman told Benzinga that the company remains a "committed partner of Microsoft" and will continue to develop "a full slate of Windows 8 products." Meanwhile, Hewlett-Packard HPQ declined to comment. Now a new report might explain why. According to Reuters, Microsoft told its partners about Surface "only days before its unveiling." Reuters quoted an unnamed Acer executive, who said, "No senior executives heard about the news last week. We're quite surprised." To make matters worse, Reuters' sources claim that Acer and Asus were not alerted of the tablet's existence until the press conference started on Monday. Hewlett-Packard has yet to publicly comment on Surface, but Dell maintains its positive outlook on Windows 8 without providing any specific comments on the Microsoft-built tablet. NVIDIA NVDA, which is supplying Tegra processors for Surface, has not returned a request for comment. But on Tuesday, AMD spokesman Travis Williams told Benzinga that while the company has not seen a Surface tablet, "we do look forward to the upcoming launch of Windows 8 and working closely with our customers like Acer, Asus, Dell, HP, Lenovo, Samsung, Sony SNE and Toshiba to ensure consumers have a myriad of platform designs to choose from once Windows 8 is in market." Follow me @LouisBedigianBZ