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 pa...