Farhad Manjoo:
For the better part of a month, I’ve been trying to replace the laptop that I use for my daily work, an Apple MacBook Pro, with Microsoft’s new tablet computer, the Surface Pro 3. I say “trying” because that’s what it has felt like; this is a machine that I’ve had to put a lot of work into adjusting to, in the hope that, at some point, I’d get used to it and see some kind of payoff.
Microsoft had an interesting idea with the Surface tablet, but I believe they failed to adequately build the infrastructure necessary to make the tablet successful. I have maintained from the beginning that desktop apps are not a good fit for a touchscreen device. I still believe that to be true.
This is not a failure in execution. It’s a failure in recognizing that much of the time a shoehorn cannot be used as an atomic weapon.
All of Microsoft’s mobile efforts feel like half-hearted placeholders. It’s as if, deep down inside, Microsoft’s board and top executives all knew that no matter what they did, they would lose overall revenue because of mobile. It’s a lose-lose situation for them in the two possible extrapolations:
And, on the OS + apps side, Microsoft’s mobile success would mean a decline in their desktop OS + apps revenue. And their total OS + apps revenue might decline as well because the average selling prices of mobile OS + app software is much lower than that of desktop software. So, even best-case, Microsoft loses money.
Lose-lose. Flip a coin.