Re: Surface RT, Microsoft launched at the same price point as the iPad 4, but substantially later, with a last-generation CPU/GPU, non-Retina screen, and a buggy, slow, pre-release version of Office RT. That last point was inexcusable, a product management fuck up of Apple Maps proportions. The whole point of Surface RT was Office, and every review of the device said "Office RT is slow and buggy." The overwhelming feeling with Surface RT is that "I'm really going to be kicking myself in 6 months when they release the next version with flagship specs to match the flagship price."

Re: Surface Pro, Microsoft launched at a Macbook Air 11" price point, without the Air's great keyboard and with substantially weaker battery life (in Engadget's test, half the battery life of the comparably-sized Acer W700). The overwhelming feeling with Surface Pro was "I'm really going to be kicking myself when they release the next iteration with Haswell and usable battery life."

On top of all that, the segmentation was arbitrary and capricious. What's the difference between Surface RT and Surface Pro? It's an explanation that probably makes sense to a marketing guy somewhere trying to differentiate SKUs, but not one that I think resonated with consumers. Nexus 7 versus Nexus 10, iPad versus iPad Mini. That's how to do product differentiation--in a way that's immediately obvious to the consumer.

There was also some weird design choices. Why the extreme wide-format screen? Did anybody even try reading a Word document in portrait mode on the thing? I can understand the format for consumer-oriented tablets, but Surface was supposed to be a "real work" office machine! Why are there two ways to manage settings, one set in Metro and another set in the Desktop? Why do so many things require going into the Desktop anyway? Who thought it was even a good idea to expose the user to two completely different UI's in the same device?

Did you see the commercial? It actually is easy to blame marketing. The surface commercial was easily the worst commercial I've seen in my life. Wasn't entertaining, and it had absolutely nothing to do with the product. Even worse was the mini-documentary Microsoft released afterwards that bragged about how awesome every aspect of the commercial was.

That, as you mentioned, is only part of the problem. RT is a disaster. The person who conceived the idea should have known that it would never succeed, because never before in the history of the world has there ever been a product that the public so obviously didn't want.

No one ever said, "I want a Windows device, but make sure it isn't capable of running Windows software."

I've been a happy Windows user since 95, but I'm starting to lose faith in Microsoft.

Products don't become bad just because they're advertised poorly.

The surface commercial was easily the worst commercial I've seen in my life

Either you watch a staggeringly small amount of television or this is hyperbole.

The Dell commercials that are running now showing how it's better than an iPad are a model of clarity by comparison. I had absolutely no idea from the breakdancing commercials what the device was capable of.

I am not a big fan of TV but I have been a creative lead for a commercial series that won a Clio award, for what that's worth.

I am not a big fan of TV but I have been a creative lead for a commercial series that won a Clio award, for what that's worth.

That's honestly really cool. I wouldn't have expected a lot of advertising people on HN.

And you're right, it's not the worst commercial ever. But considering teh staekes I thought it was pretty bad, and surprising considering how good MS marketing usually.

Agreed, but bad advertising can definitely stop a great product from selling. Good advertising, on the other hand, can help a bad product sell. Just look at how much revenue the original Blair Witch Project generated. Microsoft created a mediocre product with the Surface RT. In a market crowded with absolutely excellent devices, there is simply no room left for mediocrity.

Furthermore, Microsoft didn't only fail to illustrate the few redeeming qualities of the Surface to consumers, it didn't even begin to try. A commercial is supposed to be a form of communication between the company and its potential customers. A commercial that doesn't communicate the product's value to it's potential customers is a waste of time and money.

>Either you watch a staggeringly small amount of television, or this is hyperbole.

I admit, it's a little of both.

It does nothing to explain what the product is, let alone why you'd want one. It doesn't offer any abstract brand associations for people to connect to Microsoft. It's just a short video of bunch of people dancing frenetically around a courtyard, and if you blink, you could miss that it's got anything to do with MS at all.

The only thing it seems to actually tell you about the product, if you're paying very close attention, is that there's a flip-up stand built into the back of it. They were using that stand clicking into place as the source of the percussion for the music track. That's it - if you pay close attention and consciously look for the product they're selling, you discover that it's a commercial for a plastic stand.

MS was like "Whoa we are giving you the tablet with office 'cause you ever dreamed a tablet with office and you totally hate a tablet without office". Ballmer almost said something totally equal to it

Problem is, in the last year, market has showed that no one need a tablet with office and that office is not more a killer feature, mainly for the common users market (it has still sense in corporation market).

So they pushed and pushed on this feature when it was practically useless to convince anyone to buy an rt. This is another reason to blame failure ALSO on the marketing part of MS.

Surface RT I can't really see a market for. But Surface Pro is perfectly OK, competitive with laptops, some advantages (touch screen and stylus are nice), good screen with support for second screen, easy switch between laptop and tablet mode, some disadvantages but nothing too bad - keyboard just OK, battery just OK, only one USB port on the machine, etc. All in all next version will be nicer I'm sure, but I have one and I'm pretty happy with it and am not too worried about getting the next iteration - it works fine for me as is.

plus the reduced price should help make it attractive. It's one very functional device though. Just today I read an article of how it was perfect for a student. Will update with a link if I find it.

It really isn't. Nearly every review mentioned that it felt a little slow. Anand Tech mentioned it was "almost" as smooth as an iPad, but felt slower starting apps. Tech Radar said its graphics performance was "sluggish." Ars mentioned apps starting slower than they would like. I had a Surface RT for several weeks, and that was exactly my impression: it felt just a step slower than my wife's iPad, and that wasn't an admirable quality in a $500+$100 tablet. If Surface RT had started at $350, people would have perceived it as an acceptable compromise.

> Although office was updated a month or two after the release and fixed the performance issues in time.

It doesn't matter what happens "a month or two" after all the reviews are written. Nobody who wasn't hoping for the Surface RT to succeed bothered to go back a couple of months later to check for updates.

What I find so odd about the RT was that the desktop only existed for two reasons: Office and settings. If it wasn't for Office they could have fixed the settings that were missing in the Metro interface and the thing wouldn't have felt slightly Jekyll & Hyde. Instead it looked more like the Office team didn't believe in the product (or wasn't given enough time) and it seemed half-assed.

I have a friend who has a 64gb RT and loves it, but he bought it for $50 after the original owner wanted to get rid of it. I doubt he would have paid the $450 for it though.

Microsoft isn't cool, and that's okay. Microsoft is the boring boyfriend you know is always there and will always load Office documents easily (see 'rayiner below). It's not sexy but it doesn't have to be.

Once the need for Office goes any, then any operating system will work for many people. Linux has finally won in the consumer space in the form of Android. Hopefully, we'll see a huge flood of "desktop/notebook" Android/Chromebook devices. Get "Office" in the cloud and the 90% desktop monopoly that Microsoft has had for two decades finally goes away. Don't get me wrong... This isn't Microsoft being the wrong company to have a monopoly, it's just silly that any company has a 90% market share. We don't buy 90% of our cars from General Motors.

Let's get a little more innovation in the consumer space. Google, Apple, Microsoft, and maybe even... Ubuntu dividing up the market will be better for everyone.

Office is completely bug-ridden and unstable, and always has been.

I haven't opened up Office since 2009. And the only reason that I opened it then is that I was getting attachments from Office docs from users who used it to communicate stuff with me that could have been more effectively communicated in plain text emails.

OEM preloads (look up the Novell / DR DOS lawsuits for specifics, there's some wonderful quotes), and destroying WordPerfect and Lotus 123 through a combination of a bundled, inexpensive suite and killing both competing products in the DOS -> Windows conversion were key.

You neglected to mention file formats, the Outlook-Exchange hegemony, Active Directory, and various proprietary integration tools (Visual Basic, OLE, C#, SharePoint).

And it's probably worth noting that Microsoft did cultivate and create a vast ISV ecosystem with a huge list of titles serving a vast array of business needs. If the OS and Office ubiquity established its dominance, this cemented it.

But since 2005 the cracks have been growing visible wider. Starting then, execs at most firms I've worked for or with had Apple laptops, not Windows systems. In some cases, the CFO/bookkeeper's Quickbooks workstation was the only Windows machine in the office, in others some nontechnical staff used Windows but all of engineering and many others were on either Mac (mostly) or Linux (some). And application use is moving increasingly toward SAAS offerings, especially for engineering and project management (wikis, bugtracking, project management and planning tools, etc.), but also increasingly for office tasks (documents, spreadsheets, presentations).

The one and only version of MS Office I've ever owned was Office 97, and for the most part I've avoided having to use it for more than very incidental tasks either personally or for work ever since.

Most of my text processing is in vim. After far too long playing with it, I've finally started picking up LaTeX (it's pretty amazing, largely straightforward, and the results are fantastic). 'awk' is my go-to "spreadsheet" tool (I prefer code/data separation), though Gnumeric and LibreOffice offer very nearly anything Excel can do (I can understand how an Excel jockey might not care to make the switch, but the tools are largely as capable and interchangeable).

Isn't that pretty much the attitude that RIM had as well? This is not a successful strategy when you have to compete with a new class of devices.

PCs and mobile devices have overlapping functionality, but the use cases and contexts in which that functionality is applied are very different.

By conflating the two markets together, and allowing (poorly-conceived, IMO) product strategies for mobile devices to spill over into their flagship PC software products, MS has made a very serious error.

Surface Pro is quite a different beast from Surface RT. I think Gabe was just in love with the Waccom stylus, which is not really unique to the Pro (other tablets have this also).

The real problem with Surface is that it's a crappy overall device. The two keyboard options both suck. Microsoft is hopeless at managing screen real estate so the serious applications such as office are weak.

Yes, it's a great portable sketchpad, so Gabe is sold.

Just look at the ribbon, toolbar, status bar, etc. Not only does this waste screen real estate, it wastes vertical space which is at a premium on widescreen displays. On a widescreen monitor, Pages minimizes this cruft or puts it in palettes and sidebars.

When you've got a document loaded up in a word processor, you're not just trying to read static content; you're working on that content, and the application you're using is a tool for editing and manipulating it. Hiding the chrome in order to show more of the document emphasises the document content as it is in the immediate instant, rather than the potential things you can do with that content, and makes it harder to locate the tools and functions for manipulating the document.

Minimal chrome might make sense in a web browser or PDF reader (at least to the extent that there's a smaller set of functionality necessary for reading documents, but hiding searching/bookmarking/referencing tools is just as bad) but in a word processor, it's much more necessary to have the application's own functional interface exposed.

Well, visual artists at least. No existing audio software runs on it, and it doesn't even support playback of MIDI files. I remain somewhat interested in a Surface Pro, but (like Google, and like MS themselves on Windows for years) the Surface is only useful to musicians for checking email.

I posted a blog entry on it: http://loewald.com/blog/?p=5274

Nutshell is the tablet is good but the software kind of sucks. I can only use the tablet in mirrored mode because the tablet driver maps the surface to the combined screen, and I need to use a third party app to run the tablet at native resolution. If I were a pro, I'd probably spring for a Cintiq, but for a hobbyist it's wonderful value.