Understanding Microsoft Surface Go (Premium)

For the past two weeks, I've been trying to make sense of Surface Go, a reasonably-priced tablet PC that upends our notions about the premium pricing of Microsoft's Surface lineup. This is a bit more complex than you might think. And it speaks, I think, to the tough decision making at which Microsoft has always excelled.

The software giant, as I'm sure you know, surprised and upset its PC maker partners when it launched the Surface PC lineup in 2012 alongside Windows 8. The ramifications of that era still reverberate today: In electing to compete with its partners Microsoft caused virtually all of them to adopt Chrome OS and Android. And that, together with the poorly-designed Windows 8, hastened the inevitable decline of Windows and the PC.

Moving quickly to ameliorate its PC maker partners, Microsoft fired the person responsible for those historic mistakes. And then it created Windows 10, which is optimized for the traditional PC form factors that PC makers (and their customers) demanded and is created in a far more open fashion so that PC makers know what to expect in advance. But it also killed off its awkward low-end tablet lineup, which at that time was in its 3rd generation with Surface 3. Surface PCs, from that point forward, would be expensive and aspirational, leaving the volume part of the market to Microsoft's partners. Best of all, PC makers were free to copy Microsoft's designs in their own products, most of which would cost less as well.

If that history seems a tad too general, sorry: I feel like I've told that particular story a lot. And what I'd like to get to here is why the strategy is changing now.

And "now" is very much part of this story, I think. So let's start there.

As even an amateur Windows historian can tell you, Microsoft's client OS has been on a three-year cycle ever since the firm recovered from its Longhorn disaster. The Windows 8 release I mentioned above happened in 2012, three years after Windows 7, which itself launched three years after Windows Vista. And the initial release of Windows 10 happened in 2015, three years after Windows 8 (and right before the shift to the Surface premium pricing strategy).

Well, it's 2018, which is three years later. Microsoft will almost certainly stick with the Windows 10 branding for its next major release. But let's not get stuck on semantics. Because 2018 is already notable for the fact that Microsoft has stopped pushing nonsense into the product. And Windows 10 today is focused again on productivity and core functionality. Windows is already changing in 2018, no matter what the name is.

So what about Surface?

Microsoft's 2016 Surface releases were notable for two reasons. The lineup marked a dramatic push into the premium PC space, happening as it did right after Microsoft killed off Surface 3, its only non-Premium product. And Surface 3 notwithstanding, it marked a major expansion of the family, with Surface Studio, Surface Laptop, and Surfac...