Giving RT devices to employees continues this tradition. It's also evidence that this is an enterprise strategy, not B2C.
I used Windows 2.0. I was using WordPerfect when the first versions of Word were being developed. Surface is an MVP.
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A Note about Xbox. The way Microsoft handled the RRoD issue was pure B2B. They made it right for people out of warranty. Their choice of three years was the same as the period over which businesses depreciate assets. A B2C response would have been, "You should have purchased XboxCare."
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My point was that the Xbox was /designed/ from the ground up -- from the choice of components to the way the OS is booted and managed -- to be a consumer product. The Surface, not so much. And it shows.
Edit: Let me be a little more concrete.
Xbox: No registry. Registries suck; they become corrupt, they're hard to manage, they accumulate bloat and mystery. If a consumer has to deal with a registry, it's epic fail time.
Surface: A couple weeks ago my wife was editing the registry on her Surface in attempt to recover it. OMFG.
Xbox: A pretty decent security story, with decent support in the OS.
Surface: That's cute, guys.
Xbox: Turn it off accidentally? Trip over the power cord? No problem.
Surface: What are these things you call . . . "transactions"?
The Xbox pricing also showed some backbone. I don't know what the Surface people were thinking.
MS is certainly going to take the intel-based Surface into the enterprise. This one seems like a weird chimaera, sitting between the enterprise world and the consumer world. And that won't capture the average tablet buyer's imagination.
Instead of kludging around in the OS, you refactor Outlook, Office, Active Directory, etc. to better address the new reality of less powerful devices becoming prevalent. Clearly that's already happening as Microsoft pursues improvements in the cloud. It is also the same direction the companies the techpress love to compare them against - Apple and Google - are pursuing.
Microsoft's bet is that they will be better at delivering cloud services to enterprise (and thereby to consumers). I think the evidence makes this a pretty safe bet.
The impression I got was that it was intended for consumers. Why else would you only sell it in a Microsoft store? (I did see one in a Best Buy. It was buried in with the other tablets, while there was a shining white table with iPads a few feet away, with actual people around it fondling the merchandise).
It's true that MS did give most of their full-time employees free Surfaces. I assumed this was to promote internal use, and hey, who doesn't like free stuff?
The hardware is great, but the Windows group really, honestly didn't know how to ship a tablet OS -- they're a B2B group trying to do B2C, but not really understanding what it takes. The result is emabarassingly bad in spots. My wife was having to deal with The Scourge That Is the Windows Registry, using the event viewer and task manager to diagnose some bug in WinRT. They really do not get it . . . or if they do, it's not at the level of design and management where it matters.
You don't have to do this kind of mucking around on a Xbox. There are good reasons for this. Yet the Xbox is based on Windows. Interesting.
Windows has been institutionalized inside MS to the extent that you can't ship a platform that doesn't use it. You need to use a /lot/ of it, and it's a procrustean bed, at best. Windows is getting really old and creaky; things that you might be able to justify on a desktop (e.g., a corrupt registry, or a service horking and needing some TLC) are just death on a tablet, and having consumers drop into desktop-level tools to fix stuff is just sad.
(Don't get me started on WinRT).