Microsoft's first stab at a tablet: Surface reviewed

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So Microsoft has gone and done it.

 

 

The company has sold operating systems for other companies' computers for more than 30 years. Sticking to the software and letting other people deal with the hardware side is what made Microsoft the multinational behemoth that dominated the computing landscape through the 1990s and much of the 2000s. MS-DOS; 16-bit Windows 1, 2, and 3; the hybrid Windows 95 family; and the 32-bit (and, later, 64-bit) Windows NT family that is still with us to this day: all were sold primarily to computer OEMs for preinstallation on new machines.

 

With Surface, Microsoft is diving headlong into a new business model. Let's be blunt here: Redmond is going the Cupertino route. Microsoft is not merely writing the software. It's designing hardware to go with that software, and contracting manufacturers in East Asia to turn its designs into millions of units of real, shipping hardware, that Microsoft will be selling directly to customers.

 

Why the change of heart? The president of Windows and Windows Live Division, Steven Sinofsky, says that Microsoft has its own point of view when it comes to tablets. He pointed at Google, Amazon, and Apple, saying that each of them have their own tablet take. Google's world is centered on search and collecting data; Amazon's tablets are intended to drive purchases from Amazon's store; Apple's is designed to capitalize on the iPhone's familiarity.

 

Microsoft's take is the same as it has always been: the tablet is a sort of PC, with all the flexibility, extensibility, and variety that that entails. This mindset is fundamental to understanding why Windows 8 is the way it is. It's also why Microsoft continues to sell its operating system to OEMs; it knows that there's too much variety in the market for one company to meet every need.

 

But Microsoft has a competing pressure. It wants to show off its software in the best light possible, and controlling the whole experience—software, hardware, and even retail—is how it plans to achieve that.

 

Quite how Microsoft will sit in the broader tablet market isn't yet entirely clear. The company is keeping very quiet about production volumes and expected sales figures. There are a few predictions and rumors floating around, putting expectations in the region of low millions. That's a smaller scale than, for example, Amazon's Kindle Fire or Google's Nexus 7, but still substantial for a first product.

 

If nothing else, the limited distribution—Surface will initially be available in just eight markets—will serve to limit Surface's ability to disrupt the OEMs, making the computer more of a Nexus-like benchmark than a complete transformation of Microsoft's business model. But we can expect that to change with time. Studio B, the building in Redmond that houses the Surface team, is taking hardware seriously, and Microsoft wants to create a sustainable, profitable hardware business to position itself as a "devices-and-services" company.

 

Surface is the first product to reflect this devices-and-services ambition and I've been test driving one for about a week. Does Microsoft have what it takes to be a player in the hardware market? Can it take on not just the OEMs, but the Apple juggernaut?

 

read the rest at arstechnica