Well the event is still going on as I type this, but apparently Microsoft is going to make their own tablet to go with Windows 8. They’ve borrowed the 5-year-old name of the Surface tabletop-touchscreen device, so get ready for all sorts of Surface puns.
Short version: there’s no reason you can’t take a touch-tablet experience and cram a regular PC into it.
No, seriously. There are two versions of this trick: one running Windows RT, which is the Metro-touch-only version of Win8, and a pro version with last year’s i5 processor in it and vents around the entire perimeter of the device. Yes, folks, this is a tablet with ventilation. I see no way this ends badly.
The unique selling point so far appears to consist of a kickstand (only viable in landscape mode), a SmartCover knockoff that has a quasi-membrane keyboard on the underside (so you get a sort-of-desktop experience, because this sure as shit isn’t going to fly in your lap), and of course the opportunity to run Windows on a touchscreen interface (though presumably that’s what the SmartCover knockoff is meant to handle).
USB3 and HDMI, so they’re basically attempting to pitch this as the transitional best-of-both-worlds device that beats out your notebook and your iPad with a single gadget. But as much as Microsoft is now just basically trying to clone Apple – which is the story of Microsoft, when you get right down to it, whether Apple or WordPerfect or Netscape – they haven’t managed the presentation bit, because the first Surface crapped out on demo and they had to pull the backup. Some things never change.
When you get right down to it, that seems to be how high tech works now. Somebody invents something crazy, that’s stage one. Then somebody – usually Apple these days – perfects it and makes it something anyone can use, whether it’s an MP3 player, a consumer smartphone or a legit tablet computer. And then a couple years later, Microsoft lurches into view and barfs up a knockoff that has as its principle virtue cheapness and compatibility with the existing Windows/Office ecosystem.
The problem is, that hasn’t worked. The Zune was a joke from stem to stern. Windows Phone seems to be rounding into a contender for third place, even if it’s about to undergo a compatibility watershed. But the attempt to extend the Windows empire into tablets – to literally put a classic Windows desktop on a touchscreen tablet – suggests that Microsoft still can’t let go of Windows as the key to everything. And yet, Windows hasn’t been a part of the next big thing for a decade now. One has to wonder whether the beast of Redmond wouldn’t have been better served by making a clean break – but at this point, that may not even be conceivable. Microsoft is going to live and die with Windows, in whatever form that takes.
ETA: you have to think that Microsoft’s OEM partners are frisbee pissed. And yet, this is probably what they had to do, and looking at the Android tablet ecosystem, it’s basically their only chance: partners are not going to craft a premium experience. If Microsoft is serious about the touch-tableting of Windows, their only real choice is to do it themselves and demonstrate their vision, and hope the OEMs will play along.