There's a difference between being serious about a product and being serious enough to do what it takes to make the product succeed. Apple has set a high bar of tight hardware/software integration, where the software is hand-tuned to take advantage of everything limited mobile hardware has to offer. The market expects nothing less. The Apple model works because management is willing to control both sides, and the Android model works because everything is relatively open so the software devs can play directly with the hardware.

> there was a limited number of things we could do

No one is blaming you or your team. I'd blame the lowest person in the company who had the ability to install beta versions of Office on beta versions of Surface.

Sure, but if the right hand is as unaware of the left hand as you describe I don't think Apple has much to worry about. Going up against the dominant player with essentially no price delta means you have to be at least 2x as good.

No offense here, and I realise that you probably aren't in management, but if you can't fix a problem with slow typing and you're on the Word team, then the release should have been put back. Seriously.

Apparently not serious enough. Windows RT seems to runs a lot slower than Android 4.1 on the exact same hardware. I wonder how much slower it would run on the initial single core and dual core ARM chips for tablets than Android and iOS ran on, with decent performance.