Ask Paul: May 9 (Premium)

Happy Friday! We're back in Pennsylvania after almost four months, and the transition is going about as well as can be expected. We appreciate the clean air, the rain, and the greenness of Spring here, but we also miss our more active lifestyle from Mexico City. Nothing is ever perfect, I guess. So let's kick off this weekend a bit early with some great reader questions. Next stop, an overdue music night.
? Beside a Surface
jrzoomer asks:

Hi Paul I noticed Microsoft announced new Surface products and to be honest I had totally forgot about the Surface brand.

COME ON MAN. :)

They've had four major product announcements in the past year!

Surface Laptop 7 and Surface Pro 11 (Snapdragon X), May 2024
Surface Laptop 7 and Surface Pro 11 for Business (Snapdragon X), September 2024
Surface Laptop 7 and Surface Pro 11 for Business (Intel), January 2025
Surface Laptop 13-inch and Surface Pro 12-inch for Business (Snapdragon X Plus), May 2025

It got me thinking more about the history of Microsoft’s hardware ventures and I wanted to pick your brain on one of my favorite ones, one that maybe informed the Surface line’s development and emphasis on design, but was also was a spectacular failure, the Zune.

What if Microsoft had never exited the consumer hardware market with the Zune? Was the loss to iPod inevitable? Could it have priced it better, or hired better designers? And ultimately I wonder if it could have launched a Surface like device before the iPad, and have a stronger consumer electronics brand?

Microsoft has a surprisingly long history with hardware. It's first hardware product was a CP/M card for the Apple II series that was, at the time, the biggest market for CP/M. It bundled its first mouse with Word for MS-DOS. Etc. But by the time we got into the 2000s, Microsoft was losing its grip on consumers thanks to more consumer-focused companies, most notably Apple. (But also Amazon and Google.) With the iPod, I was just coincidentally (re)reading the internal emails from Microsoft from this time period, where they admitted that they had gotten "smoked" by the iPods and iTunes. And were worried that they would never catch up.

They were right to worry. The iPod happened at exactly the wrong time for Microsoft. It was still very much Windows-focused, and that meant partner-focused, and so it used the PC market strategy wherever it could. (Oddly, not with Xbox.) So long before there was a Zune, Microsoft had various Windows Media Audio (WMA)-based initiatives, eventually landing on PlaysForSure, and many device partners. But it was clunky. DRM-protected media was incompatible across services. It eventually created its own in-house service, MSN Music, which was honestly really cool for the day, after its top-level MTV partnership on a service called URGE, didn't turn into anything special.

Microsoft tried to get WMA on the iPod, and Apple actually agreed to that, but the terms were so bad that Microsoft was...