Microsoft Surface threatens Apple like no other tablets

Don’t underestimate Microsoft’s decision to make its own hardware.

For thirty years Microsoft dominated software like no other company. Part of its success lay in working with partners such as HP, Dell and Toshiba.

Microsoft’s hardware partners would blindly follow the software giant into battle. They probably see Microsoft’s move into hardware as betrayal. HP says as much out loud. Relations between these companies will never be the same.

A difficult move

Yet the way Microsoft reads the technology business means it has little choice but to damage those long-term relationships.

It needed to make its own hardware for two reasons. First, Microsoft saw that Apple was in danger of eating its lunch. The iPad presented the PC with its first real challenge in 30 years. Making a competitive tablet was Microsoft’s only logical response.

The old Microsoft would have developed a tablet operating system then left partners like HP and Toshiba to build the hardware. There are pre-Surface tablets from both companies and while they are not without their charms, they are not up to Apple’s standards.

And, frankly, they are not as good as Microsoft’s Surface.

Move forward or die

Microsoft had to get this right. It couldn’t leave its future to its partners, each of whom is struggling with its own long-term strategic problems.

Surface is not Microsoft’s first tablet foray. There were slate-style pen computers from Microsoft in the early 1990s. Later in that decade there were devices which switched from laptop to slate format.

They were awkward, slow, hard-to-use devices with rubbish software and unwieldy apps. One bright spot from this era was the wonderful OneNote app.

The power of the pen

By the time Apple reinvented the slate format – as the iPad – Microsoft had effectively given up on pen computers.

Say what you like about Microsoft, the company is not stupid. It almost immediately recognised the iPad as threat to its existence, as a way of bypassing its ownership of the link between individual workers and corporate systems. When it moved to address this threat, it simply could not afford to wait for others to move.

So why does Surface threatens Apple like no other tablet? Mainly because Microsoft has taken the tablet format and reinvented it in its own image.

Stepping stone

Surface represents a stepping stone between a pure tablet like the iPad and thin, mobile PCs like Ultrabooks. Sure, that may be a backward step in some respects, but Microsoft knows its corporate customers well.

Surface was not designed to appeal to end users – although many swear by the device and it’s an attractive proposition. The product is ideal for businesses where mobile devices need to fit into existing infrastructure—much of it supplied by Microsoft.

It ticks boxes that have long worried CIOs and other senior managers. It’s a relatively secure device, there’s a low total cost of ownership and there’s less scope for users to trick them out with troublesome, hard-to-support applications although they give users the freedom to easily install Microsoft sanctioned apps.