Nothing But Questions (Premium)

I genuinely like Surface PCs, but I can’t recommend them because of reliability issues. And the dulling sameness of each upgrade would make even Apple blush. And so, not for the first time—and not, I suspect, for the last—I find myself wondering what the point of it all is.

I write these words in the wake of yet another tepid Surface launch event, this one virtual and even more heavily scripted and ham-handedly presented than usual. It was full of the usual Panos Panay faux excitement, which I find tough to take but some others find endearing, though I did at least enjoy the Stevie Bathiche hair dryer moment. (If you don’t understand what I mean, please, feel free to watch the event replay.) Stevie is the best.

But I’m not here to write about the presentation, though I’m certainly not above complaining about such things. No, today, I’d like to focus on something more important, and more core of what it is that I write about, and think about, every single day: what is that Microsoft is doing with Windows and, more to the point, how it, ahem, surfaces that software in its in-house hardware. More to the point, why Microsoft even bothers anymore. Ten years on, it’s still kind of a mystery.

As Panos would say—did, in fact say—“are you kidding me?”

No, really. Are you?

Surface began as a very bad idea: Microsoft, consumed with Apple envy in the wake of the iPad and in fear of losing personal computing forever to smartphones and tablets, went down yet another me-too path. And in doing so, it forever scarred its relationship with Microsoft’s biggest partners, PC makers. That the man responsible for this line of products, Mr. Panay, is the sole remaining acolyte of Steven Sinofsky at Microsoft is both troubling and weird. That he now runs Windows itself, the product Sinofsky mortally wounded with Windows 8, would normally scare the bejesus out of these companies. But for one thing: Surface isn’t in any way competitive with its products.

This is a rather amazing fact given the decade that’s gone by and the incredible innovation we’ve seen in the PC industry. In fact, this year alone has been one of the most amazing in my memory from a PC innovation standpoint. There’s the industry-wide shift to 16:10 displays after a “we’ll look back on this and laugh” decade of 16:9 displays that were optimized for video playback and not productivity. And Intel’s overdue shift to the hybrid core architectures popularized by Arm, and something Microsoft has been asking for, for literally over a decade.

So where does Surface land in 2022? Well, not in any obvious place. It just announced three major new upgrades, none of which are major upgrades in any way: the Surface Laptop 5, the Surface Pro 9, and the Surface Studio 2+. Each is identical, from a form factor perspective to its predecessor. Surface Laptop 9 drops the AMD processor choices that were clearly the superior option, and there’s no Microsoft Pluton chipset (because, wait for it, Intel refuses to support this technology). Surface Pro 9 now offers 5G networking but only in the weak Arm-based version. And Surface Studio 2+, as hinted at by its name, literally uses previous-generation 11th-Gen Intel processors; but don’t worry, it still starts at $4500.

This product lineup is so lackluster that it almost makes me pine for the days when my big complaint about Surface was that Microsoft wasn’t yet adopting the USB-C ports that the rest of the industry had embraced years earlier. Today, that’s no longer a concern, thankfully. But Panay and company have a bit too easily filled that gap and then some. This team seems obsessed by the past. And not just by the past, but by its past: they had a single minor hit with the Surface Pro roughly a decade after the first Tablet PCs shipped, but it has had literally no luck with new form factors ever since. Meanwhile, PC sales exploded during the pandemic, leading Surface and Windows, and thus Microsoft, to wonder why. After a careful analysis of the market that they should be leading, the conclusion came down from Mount Redmond: PCs still matter! Who would’ve thunk it.

And the response, two years after the pandemic crested and then began its slow but inevitable decline, was to simply re-release the same failed products from the past but with new innards. That often offers less choice than in the past.

I utter some form of the phrase “that’s not how leadership works” a lot when it comes to Surface and now Windows, and I will do so again here. I wasn’t a fan of the team’s weird and indefensible dual display sidetrack with Surface Duo, a failure, and Surface Neo, a product that never came to market because its underlying platform, Windows 10X, was so bad it was never released in the first place. But at least it was trying to innovate. What it’s doing now isn’t even a valid response to industry trends. It’s just treading water. I guess you can’t fail if you don’t try.

Which isn’t much of a strategy when you think about it. In an age in which Apple, inexplicably, is killing it in microprocessors and Microsoft’s PC maker partners have soldiered on completely unaffected by the influence of Surface, one has to wonder what role this product line now plays. Panay will tell you—OK, did tell Axios—that Surface plays three roles: to fill the gap between the Windows software and PC hardware, to inspire other PC makers, and to create high-end devices that compete with the Mac. And … does it do any of that?

I will argue that it does not. That there is no special integration between Windows and Surface that we don’t see elsewhere in the PC market. That there is nothing Surface does that inspires other PC makers, other than to warn them which strategies not to pursue. And that Lenovo, HP, and Dell all offer stunning, high-end premium PCs that compete very effectively with the Mac.

Granted, Panay told Axios back in January that the pandemic-era PC sales boom was sustainable. Flash forward to quarters of falling sales and his tune has changed: now we’re told that the “pandemic-fueled PC buying spree is increasingly looking like a blip rather than a sustainable boost to annual sales.” “I’m not saying there aren’t headwinds,” Panay acknowledged.

It’s not his fault: Panay, like his predecessors, and especially like his original mentor, is not an industry seer and he has no special skills when it comes to predicting what customers will want. (Key evidence: Surface.) What he is, is a product guy, someone who came up out of Microsoft’s hardware group back when the most exciting products it made were keyboards and mice. He’s good at fussing out the physical and seems to get a bit lost when he has to talk about near-metaphysical topics like “staying in your flow” or how dual screens magically make you more productive, even though we’ve long known that humans are terrible multitaskers and easily distracted.

The question now is what Surface should become.

Should Microsoft bake special Windows integrations into Surface and then deny them to its partners, much like Google does with Pixel? (To no great success either, as it turns out.) Does Surface hold the key to some coming hardware or form factor innovation that will elude other PC makers? Is there any reason at all to think that a mature, legacy product like Windows can even support such things given that smartphones (and, to a degree, tablets) have already run away with the personal computing market?

I don’t have any answers, of course. I have ideas, speculation. I have … beliefs. I have a weird, mixed view of Surface that is hard to rectify in that I hate what it did to the industry but really do like the products, mostly. I guess I just have questions. I bet many of you do too. And that’s not where we should be ten years into this journey.