Even Microsoft is Still Trying to Figure Out Surface Duo (Premium)

Surface Duo is perhaps the most confusing hardware product that Microsoft has ever announced. It doesn’t seem to have a clear purpose, there’s no meaningful audience waiting for it, and it’s not even a particularly unique form factor. What is Microsoft’s real motivation in creating Surface Duo? And what does the future hold for a device, that many believe will quickly disappear from the market?

To get started answering these questions, we turn primarily to Panos Panay. And he doesn’t just run Windows and Surface: Panay is now taking credit for having invented Surface Duo in the first place.

Panay told Fast Company that he began “fantasizing” about “a fold-up Surface device” about six years ago. That puts the time frame at 2014, which is the year Microsoft summarily canceled another of Panay’s fantasies, the Surface mini, an 8-inch Windows RT mini-tablet that would have been dead on arrival had Satya Nadella—then new to the CEO role—and his senior leadership team not summarily canceled it just as it was entering production.

It is not just a historical footnote to point out that the other Surface product that Microsoft planned to announce late that summer, Surface Pro 3, was originally a side-project of little interest compared to Surface mini. After all, Panay has since justified all of his product decisions on the success of Surface Pro 3, the “tablet that can replace your laptop,” and the only truly successful Surface hardware design that he’s ever created. But we’ll get to that in a bit.

For now, let’s focus on Panay’s 2014 fantasy about a folding Surface device. “Smitten with the possibilities,” Fast Company mythologizes, Panay “hinged two pieces of metal into a folding slab, then carried it in his pocket just to get a sense of what size and shape he should shoot for.”

This fascinates me, not because I think Panay is some kind of a design genius but because it leaves out the one piece of the puzzle that we’re still struggling with today now that Surface Duo is an actual and (soon to be) shipping product: Why? What was it about a folding Surface device that made it so attractive and interesting? What problems would it solve? How would it be superior to the devices we then had or would soon have?

If Fast Company or Panay had filled in that crucial detail, this post wouldn’t exist. But instead of justifying the “why” of Surface Duo, Panay pushes forward with other questions.

“How does it feel when you open and close and open and close it—where’s the fidget factor?” Panay says he asked himself. “How thin does it need to be? Does it fit in my pocket when I sit down? Should we make it as small as possible? And you start getting into the tradeoffs of thickness and how much battery life it needed and how bright the screens needed to be.”

From there, Fast Company and Panay move forward to the technical difficulties of making such a device while only barely pausing to acknowledge that Microsoft did not exactly invent the notion of dual-screen smartphones, just as it did not invent the Surface Pro form factor; many other had tried and failed before. “Surface Duo has two screens, two batteries, two subsystems,” Panay said. “We had to make two of everything.”

Yes. But why?

Folks, there is no answer. Instead, Surface Duo—and Surface Neo, which is now indefinitely delayed—like HoloLens before it has no clear initial purpose. Instead, Microsoft appears to have fallen into the “it’s so cool” trap that bogs down many a technology enthusiast and has explicitly voiced its hopes that its early adopters would invent viable use cases for it. It is throwing spaghetti at the wall and seeing if it sticks.

Even Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella can’t answer the “why” question.

“People who are really serious about software should make their own hardware,” he said when asked why Microsoft would ship such a device, once again evoking the widely-misunderstood techno-seer Alan Kay. “It’s people at the center,” he adds, falling naturally into a Microsoft marketing phrase. “And then [we] think about all the devices in their lives and the experiences that span all those devices.”

That’s nice. But why?

Another interesting aspect of this central and still-unanswered question is that the very act of making a dual-screen device like Duo is what triggers many of the other questions we have about the device.

For example, why doesn’t Surface Duo have [insert your favorite pet peeve missing feature; NFC, water-proofing, 5G, a good camera system, whatever]?

“We weren’t bent on, ‘Okay, show me the specs,’” Panay claims. “That’s not the point. I want to know what people are going to do on the product, and can we make it great for them?” You want NFC for contactless payments? Sorry, this is a dual-screen device for Microsoft 365. Or, as Fast Company puts it in the case of the lackluster single-lens camera, “the Duo’s folding design precludes a bump on its back to house the fancier multicamera systems of other phones.”

Put simply, the folding design dictates the rest. What it has and does. And what it doesn’t have and doesn’t do.

And why use Android? Microsoft makes its own software platforms, and it talks about the one billion users on Windows 10 regularly.

“Surface is about how we can envelop all of Microsoft 365 through a piece of hardware, regardless of the platform that it’s on, ultimately getting the chance to make people more productive,” he said, not answering the question. “That’s true of the Surface Duo even though it’s radically different than any Surface that has preceded it, down to its Android operating system.” Surface Duo, he says, delivers “the Microsoft you love and the Android you know … We want to meet customers where they are.” It’s so easy to fall back on familiar marketing terms.

But here is the most telling moment in this whole conversation. Who, exactly, did Microsoft make Surface Duo for? What is the audience?

“Surface fans who live in the Microsoft app ecosystem,” Panay says. As if that is some kind of viable market of customers.

And yes, that’s literally all he says about that topic.

I’m almost as troubled by the mythologizing of Panay and Surface, whose achievements are, if anything, being exaggerated.

“Panos has shown this so many times over for us with Surface,” Shilpa Ranganathan told the publication. “You set up reference hardware, you create a beautiful experience, you create this perfect marriage between hardware and software, and people do follow. And so my hope is it does create a new category.”

This happened once, with Surface Pro 3, not “so many times.” All of the other Surface designs and form factors have failed. And while Surface Pro 3 had some unique design elements, like the 3:2 display that is ideal for a tablet, it wasn’t a new form factor, and it wasn’t invented by Microsoft. Panay and Microsoft are chasing a history that is partially invented so that they can try to repeat a success that, sorry, could simply be a one-off, a device maker’s version of a one-hit-wonder.

We’ll see how well Surface Duo does in the market, and it’s possible that some use case does emerge. HoloLens, for example, did find purpose in various vertical markets and Microsoft adjusted its strategy accordingly. Likewise, the Surface Pro 3 that Microsoft falls back on so much as a success was, as its name suggests, a third-generation try. Sometimes these things take time.

Of course, the more likely scenario is that Surface Duo fails. After all, past behavior is the best predictor of future behavior. But I am curious to see Microsoft move forward with more Android devices, most obviously with a Surface Pro-type device.

That is, after all, its only successful form factor.