The Purpose of Surface

2008.04.26   prev     next

What’s the point of Microsoft’s Surface, touch-interface, table-top computer? Do you really want such a product? Who does? Here’s my theory about what their idea with this is.

Virtually all of Microsoft’s successes over the past 10-20 years have come from leveraging the dominance of Windows into other areas. That’s how they beat Netscape out of the browser market. That’s how they beat several companies out of the office-suite market. And that’s how they’ve tried, unsuccessfully, to drive away popular products and formats such as iPod, JPEG, QuickTime, Java, MP3, and AAC. It’s Microsoft’s whole market strategy.

Naturally, the bigger and juicier the product, the more Microsoft wants to subvert it and take it over. So the iPhone has to be their target du jour. But Microsoft has already tried for many years (and at huge expense) to leverage the dominance of Windows into success in the mobile phone and PDA markets, and it hasn’t worked.

So I think Surface is an attempt to place a stepping stone between Windows and iPhone. First, Microsoft will leverage the success of Windows into the success of Surface. This should be more feasible since a tabletop PC can surely run a modified version of real Windows, not a totally new OS that just has “Win” in its name, which is what we effectively got in their mobile/PDA offerings.

Then, the successful, market-dominating Surface can be leveraged into the success of a “Pocket Surface” — which will eventually drive the iPhone into niche share.

Why It Won’t Work

Two reasons:

1. By the time (if not long before) Microsoft can complete this stepping stone to iPhone, the iPhone will be a strongly market-dominating product in its field (smartphones). Then, a Microsoft iPhone wannabe will be about as successful as Zune was against the iPod. The iPhone, like the iPod, works just as well on a Windows PC as it does on a Mac — so there’s no leverage.

2. Every time Microsoft has successfully leveraged Windows dominance into another field, it’s been a field that was already at least modestly established as a bread-winner by some other company. But nobody has established table-top “surface” computers. Microsoft can use Windows dominance to get people to buy Microsoft X instead of TurboCorp X, when TurboCorp’s nascent success has already shown that consumers want X. But if nobody wants X in the first place, then nobody thinks they have to have Microsoft X.

Update 2008.04.28 — Added sentence, “The iPhone ... no leverage.”